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Ashley Mills (@ashleyjsmills) from Vodafone’s R&D group was first to present and delivered a talk on R&D’s work with the mbed team. The mbed is an ARM based microcontroller coupled with a cloud based compiler environment for developing embedded devices. R&D has been working with mbed to write and test a library for Vodafone dongles, you can find out more about this here.

Nicholas Herriot, from Vodafone R&D, as well as Chris Styles and Amit Naran from the mbed team, were also in attendance.

Ashley presented a live coding demo to accustom the audience to the the mbed platform and followed this with a breakdown of a demo application called "The Question Mark":

This comprises a thermal printer, an mbed microcontroller, and a Vodafone K3770 USB dongle. Whatever is sent via SMS to the question mark, it prints via the dot! Ashley went on to share the details of the dongle API with the attendees and to ask for feedback on how to improve it.

The next speaker of the evening was Jim Kosem (@halfmanhq) from Intel spoke about yocto project, a set of templates, tools, and methods for creating customised embedded linux distributions.

The final speaker of the evening was Patrick Bergel (@goodmachine) from Animal Systems. Patrick introduced a new way to send short messages (50 bits) over very short distances: via audio through a system named "Chirp".

The speakers were followed by the customary 45 minutes of eating, drinking, and networking. It was a fantastic event and we’d like to thank all who attended.