Yesterday evening I went along to the inaugural London Arduino Meetup. It was very well organised by Marc Barto (@marc_in_london). The capacity crowd was interesting and lively.
Marc is keen to bring together new experimenters and experienced mentors, and that format should work really well. At the next meeting there will be a chance for projects to do a pitch for help, and I think we'll be looking at plans for workshops.
There will also be talks, and a chance for participants to show off our latest projects.
Last night there was a fascinating presentation by Tim Burrell-Saward (@tburrellsaward). He's a maker and designer, and he showed us some of the outstanding installations he's created. One of my favourites was a Wikipedia update snowstorm (not its proper name, which I forget) - a farm of re-purposed supermarket checkout printers overhead, spitting out updates to wikipedia as thy were made. The short printouts fell to the ground like snowflakes.
The group is not just for Arduiners. It welcomes all Makers using systems on a chip. There's a focus on Arduino but the group is happy to embrace other platforms. Many of us turned out to be Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. Since Quick2Wire is experimenting with Pi/Arduino combinations, I think we'll get a lot of value from the group, and will do our best to give value back in return.
I hope to attend the next meeting (TBA) and will take along C3Pi (né trackbot) - our experimental Pi/Arduino based tracked robot.