2014 was our first ever Maker Faire and we enjoyed it so much that we are going back for more this week. I’m expecting to see many robots, connected things, wearables and who know what else passing by the ARM booth which can be found in Zone 2 near the main entrance – just look for the large ARM balloon. The event runs over the weekend of 16th-17th May with a corporate/press/education day on Friday 15th.

Come along to our booth and see how quickly you can get the eyes flashing on our robot for a chance to take an mbed development board home for your next project. We are fortunate enough to have some of our mbed Applications Engineers on site who will be able to answer questions from getting started with programming to senior engineers with tricky questions at companies shipping millions of gadgets per day.

Last year we ordered a new coffee machine for the office and it was working really well in the R&D department but it vanished for a few hours one day. Next thing we knew it had been retrofitted with a color sensor connected to an NXP LPC1768 mbed development board and connected to the cloud. From that moment on we all had our daily coffee intake monitored and the stock levels of Nespresso capsules were always replenished. This is what happens when mbed Engineers have access to 3D printers, sensors, development boards and a few wires. I managed to prise the coffee machine from the R&D team for a week and ship it over to our San Jose office ready to show (and tell) all about it this weekend. I forgot to tell the team that it will then fly to Taiwan and Shenzhen for the upcoming Maker Faires there – looks like productivity in the office could suffer in the coming weeks.

The Zebra technologies team will join us on the booth to show off their Connected Wine Rack demo. This seems to be a regular wine rack that one of their engineers decided to connect to the cloud in order to never run out of wine. The wine rack is covered with sensors to detect the presence of a smart wine bottle and report stock levels to the Zatar cloud platform. Again, this is what happens when engineers mix mbed and everyday objects. I just need to remember to bring the corkscrew.

As usual, there are plenty of events coming up so if anyone has any suggestions of embed powered things we should consider showing please let me know and we can work out a way to get it seen.

See you at the show (and tell).

Phill