“Hands On Wireless Sensor Network” (#HandsOnWSN) is a peer-to-peer learning community to build Wireless Sensor Networks using Arduino and XBee. The list of the most active contributors includes Luis Sanabria, Javier López and Laia Albó. The idea was to bootstrap a P2P learning community by providing some content and then accepting the contributions of the community to keep growing and improving.

The project includes a course at the Peer-to-Peer University, a meetup group, videos, a written guide, forum and mailing list. While the guide we had prepared back in 2013 has been tremendously successful, with more than 1,400 downloads in scribdb at the time of this writing, the other additional material that we have created has not received that much attention .

The number of downloads of the guide in scribdb does not account for the total nuber of downloads as the guide is also directly available at our site. A lesson that I have learned is that “2.0” content is not necessarily more successful than an old-fashioned guide.

Another lesson that I have learned is that embarking in the #HandsOnWSN odyssey has pushed me to do thing that I would have not done otherwise. I’ve explored new horizons, met uncountable people and learned a lot.

We have had a lot of problems with the mysterious unresponsiveness of the XBees. Now I suspect that the explanation of the problems lies in the XBee Explorer which we have also used as a breakout board after soldering male pins.