At
Empire Node, the swag bag included a portable USB charger. It kind of boggled my mind, because it was almost the only truly useful thing I'd ever received in a swag bag. That was a few months ago.
Since then, my concept of conference swag has kind of exploded. The swag bag at RobotsConf was
insane. In fact, the RobotsConf freebies were already crazy delicious before the conf even began.
About a month before the conference, RobotsConf sent a sort of "care package" with a
Spark Core, a Spark-branded Moleskine notebook (or possibly just a Spark-branded Moleskine-
style notebook?), and a RobotsConf sticker.
At the conference, the swag bag contained a
Pebble watch, an
Electric Imp, an
ARDX kit (Arduino, breadboard, speaker, dials, buttons, wires, resistors, and LEDs), a
SumoBot kit (wheels, servos, body, etc.), a little black toolbox, a Ziplock bag with several AA batteries, and a RobotsConf beanie. There were a ton of stickers, of course, and you could also pick up a bright yellow
Johnny Five shirt.
Many people embedded LEDs in the eyes of their RobotsConf hats, but I wasn't willing to risk it. I live in an area with actual snow these days, so I plan to get a lot of practical usefulness out of this hat.
Spark handed out additional free Spark Cores at the conference, so I actually came home with
two Spark Cores. This means, in a sense, that I got five new computers out of this: the Pebble, the Arduino in the ARDX kit, the Electric Imp, and both Spark Cores. Really just
microcontrollers, but still exciting. And of these five devices, the Pebble can connect to Bluetooth, while the Imp and Spark boxes can connect to WiFi.
Technical Machines didn't include
Tessel microcontrollers in the swag bag, but they did set up a table and loan out a bunch of microcontrollers and
modules to play with. I saw
one developer code up a point-and-shoot camera in CoffeeScript, in about a minute. (The Tessel runs JavaScript, including most Node code.)
Likewise, although you couldn't take them home on the plane with you, there were a bunch of 3D printers you could experiment with. All in all, an amazing geeky playground. The only downside is that presented a tough act to follow, for Santa Claus (and/or Hanukkah Harry).