🔋 TI Tech Day 2012 – Learning with Texas Instruments

I attended TI Tech Day in São Paulo — an event organized by Texas Instruments Brasil with the participation of engineers from Dallas, USA. It was my first time in an industry-focused event of this scale, and I went mainly out of curiosity and a growing interest in embedded systems.

I wasn’t deeply experienced yet, but I was actively learning and experimenting with hardware platforms. At the time, I had a BeagleBone on my desk and was comparing it with the Raspberry Pi, trying to understand the differences in how each platform handled GPIO, Linux, and development tools.

One of the hands-on sessions I joined was about porting Linux and U-Boot to the BeagleBone, which was fascinating even if a bit overwhelming. It gave me a glimpse into how deep embedded development could go.

I was also very curious about TI’s MSP430 LaunchPad kits. They were being presented as Arduino alternatives — low-power microcontroller boards with good support for embedded C development. I didn’t get to use them extensively at the time, but I left the event with a strong interest in going deeper.

The event was packed with talks and demos. I remember walking between rooms not knowing where to focus — everything felt new and exciting. Just being around engineers and hardware developers was inspiring.

TI Tech Day helped reinforce my interest in moving away from pure industrial automation and toward IT and embedded development. It wasn’t a technical leap forward, but it was a motivational one.

It felt like a door opening. The event website (now from Archive) here