July is a tough meeting for MHVLUG, people are off on vacation, and our turnout over the last few years has been pretty low. It’s one of the few times we drop below 20 people. As Ben was putting together the schedule this year, we were getting no luck having speakers stick for the July meeting. So I suggested something a little different, lets do the Arduino Documentary, and then encourage people to bring in Arduino projects to show off. It would give me motivation to work on my own projects, and should be overall quite fun. If nothing else, I’d finally have my lighting strips wired up.

It was an amazing success. We had at least 40 people there (which is more than we’ve had at any meeting in a long time), lots of new faces, including a few boy scouts working on their robotics merit badge. The documentary was well received, done at 6:35, and we had people buzzing around asking questions until well after 7:30. I got to show off what I did, and get some good feedback from others. And many, many times I heard from people how excited seeing all these projects made them. I think lots more people are going to be building Arduino projects over the next couple of months. This is definitely going to become an annual thing.