You might like to read the article about the morning’s presentation of Nightscout to families at the CWD FFL 2015 conference if you’ve not already done so.
Afternoon Presentation/Workshop
It seems the afternoon session was the only one actually listed in the FFL programme so we had more people, about 30, attending.
Like the morning session they were really attentive, most of them knew Nightscout already, they wanted it, they needed it and they thankfully had a lot of questions.
First we gave the obligatory warning that Nightscout isn’t an approved thing, it can’t be bought, it’s not something anyone would build for you, you should never make a medical decision based on information shown etc. etc..
After debunking the myth that this was a solution only available to nerdy geeks we showed the routes into Nightscout from a ‘How Do You Get Your CGM In The Cloud‘ article, quickly dismissing some of the USA-centric options like Share and focussing on using a Dexcom receiver, xDrip device or using the uploader for Medtronic CGM (not 640g).
Kate showed the original ‘rig’ where a phone is directly connected to a Dexcom receiver as this is what her family first used, but now they use xDrip.
I presented the xDrip wiring diagram and hopefully quickly busted the myth that it’s hard to build. For me this was the easiest bit to present as I knew most of the audience just got it, for some the penny dropped during the presentation, for some it just reaffirmed what they already knew and thought.
People were keen to see some model xDrips so I passed my two spares to members of the audience, whilst Tim demonstrated the tiny one in a TicTac box which he wears on a band around his bicep which he prefers to do so he doesn’t forget it.
Jesus talked about the components required to build MMCommander to get CGM data from Enlites (for Medtronic 530 and Veo pumps) into Nightscout, which received a lot of interest from the audience.
In the last slide Kate spoke about the different cloud services which were required for a standard Nightscout installation: Azure, for the web site; MongoLab, where the data is held; GitHub, where the code is for everything.
Workshop session
At the start of the workshop session we split into two tables, one for Medtronic with Jesus, one for Dexcom/xDrip with Kate, Tim and myself. Stuart meanwhile helped one of the audience members sort out issues with her set up, she left with it working properly.
I spent most of my time showing the two of the different xDrips I’d built, fielding questions about the components or how to build them or issues I faced.
It’s hard to imagine how the session could have gone any better: people seemed to get the answers they needed; people seemed engaged; many said they would order the components that night and set up Nightscout as soon as possible.
From my point of view we had achieved our goal, that one family walked away from the presentation/workshop having discovered something they could set up to help them. But in this case it wasn’t one, it was probably 20 or 30.