I’ll likely be there from shortly after 6pm. Like Tony, I should probably introduce myself: I’m Roger Lipscombe, and I’m a developer on Electric Imp’s backend team; I’m also based in London. Tony can do the evangelist stuff; I’ll stick to the beers 
Sorry to be blunt bur we don’t need “evangelist stuff” this was just friendly meetup of users we don’t want any corporate bollocks.
Well that’s handy, controlCloud, because neither do I.
My apologies; no offence was intended. There won’t be any evangelist stuff. What I meant was more in the line of “Tony’s the ex-Reg journalist, I’ll leave him to do the talking – journalists are good at talking – while I quietly drink beer in the corner.”
None of which is to imply that journalists – particularly ones from The Register – aren’t also good at drinking beer.
No corporate bollocks, promise.
Wow, I am jealous. Beer and Imps. If only London were a bit closer.
Let’s not recreate the imp drowning experiment, I don’t think it’d work in beer as well as it did in veggie oil.
btw Are these Tony’s Articles ?
None other, back_ache
…and we are quite light on corporate bollocks tbh. Evangelism is more “showing people what our stuff will do” in a very practical sense, then people can make their mind up as to whether that’s helpful to them or not.
We hope it is, but we’re not the right solution for every problem and are quite happy saying that 
Guys. Thanks for a good evening. Enjoyed meeting everyone and hearing about the various projects on the go. Hope I didn’t bore everyone too much with the ‘garage’ implementation :-j
Look forward to the next one.
Dave
Good to meet everyone.
Dave I for one would like to know more on your garage proj, like where the LED display board is from and what distance sensor you used.
Agree with all of the above: a very good evening, and it was really good for an Imp newbie to meet so folk using our gear for real things. See you all next time.
My article about the garage is here. The display is made up of two of these in a horizontal stacking, coupled with a display board from here that takes the hard work out of driving all the RGB pixels. The display board has some drawing primitives, and also some text placement primitives, and lastly a capability to scroll text within a region.
The distance sensor is a Maxbotix LV-EZ4 which is the narrow beam version. It has a 1cm resolution and RS232 output and I’ve had readings up to 8m on it. I sourced mine from www.coolcomponents.co.uk.
The whole setup is powered by a 10amp capable 5v main supply. I think I calculated that if every possible LED was on (it only displays one row at a time), then it would consume 8A.
Details about my use of Pushover (to send me alerts about whether the garage door has just been opened or closed and whether the/a car is in the garage) are in the article, together with my iPhone ‘app’ (html) to look at the door status and open/close it.
It’s still ‘on the bench’ and would dearly love to box it up and finish it off. Whilst I could easily assemble something out of timber, it wouldn’t look very elegant. So, I’m investigating the possibility of working with acrylic/perspex, laser cutting, router cutting, etc, etc.
It was great to meet everyone, tech was talked and beer was drank.
Dave thanks for this.
For LED display. What about using the enclosure of emergency lighting exit sign. http://bit.ly/1kC8Obv
Or look at Fibox enclosure http://www.fibox.co.uk/catalogs/catalog.taf?pg_parent=183