I will be doing a Gadgeteer presentation Nov 19th from 6:30pm to 8:45pm to the Calgary IT Pro Community, come on by as not only will you get to see me do the Gadgeteer Happy Dance, we are also offering a Surface Pro 2 as a door prize. Note this presentation is free.
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Have my demo boards ready to go, should work as a nice intro to gadgeteer. The only think Iām thinking I should take is my autonomous navigation robot, but that gets to be a bit much. Iāll take a couple of cases of different modules so Iāll be covered for about anything someone could dream up for questions.
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Nice collection! 
Very nice.
Sorry about the Stampeders, Roughies had to win though. 
Nice collection indeed, good luck buddyā¦
Will there be video posted afterwards of the happy dance? :dance:
And may I also suggest to put your demo boards on the showcase - please.
Iāll post some of the projects in CodeShare, but the others Iām not to sure if I should share them as they are either updates of previous projects that Iād shared or updates of other shared projects and a couple were just designed to show off some Gadgeteer features or build to compare against an Arduino project, showing the advantages of Gadgeteer.
The presentation went rather well and lasted for 2 1/2 hours, could have gone longer as really Gadgeteer is just that cool. The questions afterwards were good and had a number of people ask if different modules etc were available and I was able to answer yes for pretty much all of them and showed them (as I have a lot of modules) and those that I didnāt have I was able to point them out in GHIās catalog or in the Community Creations section (where did that Lightning detector go as one government agency was rather interested).
It is coming this weekend for sure.
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I would love to see and hear those arguments, for my backers, to be sure that I am well armed when the question pops.
I kept the Arduino comparison very simple (note there were some Arduino guys in the audience). A simple LED / Joystick project and then swap out the motherboard for another one (ie I went from a USB Mountaineer to a Cerberus). Toss in which has easier to understand code and the point was made.
Show them the IDE, itās no contest there
I showed the designer, debugging, etc so ya the Arduino guys got pretty quiet other then to say āwhere do I get Gadgeteer?ā and when the question of cost of Visual Studio came up, the fact that it works with express which is free pretty much end that.
edit I should also mention there was one Raspberry Pi dude there but he really wasnāt doing much with it, but he liked the look and ease of Gadgeteer, and was considering switching.
Why switch? The strengths of the two platforms donāt overlap muchā¦
[Clarification:] Which is to say, you donāt have to be a āGadgeteer personā OR a āRaspberry Pi personā.
The problem he was having with his Raspberry Pi was he thought it would be easier to build devices around, so perhaps the problem was he started with the wrong platform for what he wanted to do and should have gone with Gadgeteer as it pretty much exactly fits what he wanted to do. Right now he has his Pi single tasked and he is happy with what its doing for him, but for building prototypes etc Gadgeteer would work better for him.
Again the problem is you have so few hardware guys, but really even fewer software guys and so Gadgeteer lowers the bar for software guys to get in and they will help drive the hardware demand. While this group tended to have a lot of IT Pros in it, most of them had written code and some of them were uber hardware freaks (complete with reflow ovens. hardware labs etc), it was an interesting and somewhat challenging group to do a presentation for. Who knows perhaps we will get some new modules from some of these guys.
Itās all about using the right tool for the job.