There were drinks and dim-sum (nice) and it was generally urbane and hi-tech. One firm, Quick2Wire, had a set of small boards that they used to daisy-chain sensor boards together:
The board at the top, an interface board, is attached to a Raspberry Pi (very popular at the moment). Off this is a kind of "booster" board called a Port Extender, which also does some signal processing, then the next board (an A-D converter) has a light sensor. When you covered the sensor, the light bar on the interface board at the top decreased. The second extender at the bottom interfaces directly with another display, worked from the PC attached to the Pi. The advantage of using the Raspberry Pi, as the chap doing the demonstration told me, was that it could multi-thread these two tasks as it was running Linux.
Another display was from the Open University. This showed the contents of their My Digital Life course, which looks pretty cool.
Students are provided the hardware and download a version of MIT's Scratch, which I mentioned in a previous entry, to program. All-in-all, quite impressive.
I had a quick walk around and had a brief look at the other displays, but they were very much of a muchness. It was all a little bit mundane; middle class and domestic, I thought (more than a few projects were for energy saving). I had thought that the future would be a little grander than this. Maybe when the technology got smaller, the ideas did too?
As for whether these things will result in a resurgent U.K. economy, it's worth remembering that the bulk of these (all the above, for example) are made in China. Only Arduino boards are made elsewhere (Italy). Again, as so often in our history, we may have the ideas, but others will take them and build on them. In the past that was America, now it's the Far East.
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