What do you get when you put 75 engineers and boxes of all sorts of electronic components together in a concrete UFO?

You get the biggest mbed hands-on workshop we've ever attempted! Here are the details...

We travelled to the Elektor Live! show this weekend, which was being hosted at Evoluon in Eindoven, The Netherlands. Here is what it looks like from the outside:

As part of Elektor Live!, Wisse @ Elektor had invited us to run an mbed workshop. When I said yes I think we were expecting maybe 15-20 places. It turns out 75 people signed up before they stopped accepting people! Here is everyone, ready to go:

We wanted to run the workshop as a hands-on, allowing everyone to experiment with new things and at their own pace. We had already had the idea of putting together a workshop kit of interesting parts, with of all sorts of Sparkfun breakouts and bits for people to play with. Turns out we had to make 4 in the end :)

Here are the four boxes I put together on thursday, almost complete and ready for the workshop. Primarily Sparkfun breakout board like accelerometers, gyros, screens, sensors, trackballs, rfid readers, ...

We also took some breakout boards; Cool Components and Starboard Orange...

and some of our newly designed Pololu based m3pi robots...

I think pretty much everything got used once.

And for completeness, here is the presentation I used to introduce the workshop:

Thanks to everyone who took part! It was excellent to see so many people experimenting and getting this running so quickly. The feedback was really good too, so we think we've got a great recipe for a workshop.

If you think there would be enough interest to run a workshop like this near you, give us a shout here or on twitter! Especially if you want to hep run it :)