The WirelessLAN Professional Conference is taking place from February 21st to 23rd in Phoenix, AZ. This event brings together WiFi professionals so that they can get to know each other, and, more importantly, to learn from each other. This is reflected by the format of the conference. There are no vendor booths and all speakers take time from their busy schedules to put together presentations on a wide variety of topics.
Bootcamps
The boot camps will take place prior to the main event and consist of training sessions for a number of WLAN certifications such as Cisco WIFUND, CWAP, CWDP, CWNA, CWNA Spanish, CWSP, and ECSE. If you are a wireless professional and looking to advance your career, it’s a great opportunity to learn from the best in the field. All instructors are practicing professionals, technical authors, and prolific bloggers.
Main Event
The core of the conference is 33 TEN talks (ten-minute talks). Ten minutes may seem like too short a time to give a technical presentation, but it has the benefit of making the presenter focus on the core of the message without fluffy introductions and unnecessary tangents.
To give you an idea, Robert Boardman will be presenting “Building The Tools You Want Through 3D Printing,” Mike Lebovitz will present “Tackling The Wi-Fi At SuperBowl 51,” and Mitch Dickey will present “Single Channel Adventures.”
The conference keeps evolving every year based on participant feedback, and this year the organizers are introducing two maker sessions: “Odroid Throughput Test Computer – Build, Configure & Testing” by Jerry Olla, and “Software Defined Radio – Build, Configure & Hands-On Exercises” by Ryan Adzima.
I have a TEN talk entitled “Turn your Odroids or Raspberry Pis into Remote WiFi Monitoring Sensors” on Thursday 2/23 at 9:29-9:39. I will demonstrate how to convert a single board computer to a remote wireless sensor. It builds upon Jerry Olla’s maker session where the participants will learn how to configure and use a single board computer (SBC), such as the Odroid, for testing the throughput and consistency of a WLAN. The maker session will teach you how to use command line utilities. My talk will demonstrate how to use the same utilities over a cloud-based GUI that controls the SBC remotely and stores historical test data for easy access.
I am looking forward to meeting all the WiFi folks I’ve been following on Twitter and three days of wireless geek talk immersion.