I'm presenting my paper describing a class in which students build a quadcopter from scratch at SIGGRAPH next week in LA. If you want to build your own, the materials are all on github.
The Non-Volatile Systems Lab (in conjunction with SNIA) hosted the first Persistent Programming In Real Life (PIRL) conference earlier this week. PIRL is a small meeting of software developers on the front lines of understanding how to use new persistent memory technologies.
We had stellar slate of speakers and keynotes from industry and academia. You can check out all the detail at the PIRL website.