Have an old phone or tablet? Don’t sell it, run a robot. While the phone platform is much more restrictive than Raspberry Pi, but it’s also much simpler. Additionally it provides a great screen, a touch interface, sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes and a compass, a high resolution camera, a microphone, a speaker, Bluetooth and WiFi.

This talk will give an overview of React Native, and how to use React Native to control a robot and give it all the previously mentioned capabilities. Want to do more advanced things with your robot like adding cloud based AI, this talk will talk about that as well. As always Scott will bring a robot or two and demo the code live during the talk.

Scott Preston is an engineer, developer and entrepreneur from Columbus, Ohio. Scott enjoys making things that run on JavaScript. Whether it’s a robot, a smart home, or an Iron Man suit, Scott always has a story to tell. He’s been speaking about robotics, artificial intelligence or JavaScript since 2005 at local user groups or national conferences, including a local favorite, CodeMash.

Scott’s currently working as an independent consultant focusing on JavaScript Technologies and Cloud.

You can reach him on twitter @scottpreston.

Writing clean, readable, front-end applications is often a challenge, and there are tons of frameworks and libraries that seek to solve this problem. One of the fastest growing solutions out there today is React. Developed by Facebook, React (and its companion library, Redux) is a highly scalable and elegant solution to many of javascript’s UI challenges. This talk will focus on the basics of how to get started in React, as well as some of the ideas behind writing clean and scalable React applications, and how to implement those ideas in large UI projects. It will also cover Redux, a state management library also developed by Facebook and built to work well with React applications.

Yasi Minachi is a software developer at Pillar Technology, and has been writing code professionally for six years in an eclectic mix of different languages, frameworks, and projects, both front and back-end. In her spare time, she likes playing board games, indoor rock climbing, and exploring new things to do in Columbus.