SouthendTechmeet

A monthly Tech Meetup in Chelmsford on the first Thursday of the month 7pm-10pm at Patch.

6.30pm - Setup
6.45pm - Doors open
7.00pm - Arrivals
7.30pm - Discussions, news, events
7.45pm - Occasional short talk / Q/As
8.15pm - Discussions / Networking / Working on Projects
9.45pm - Suggested departure time
10.00pm - Doors closed

We're looking for people to give talks, help with organisation, promotion and recruitment, share skills with others, and work on exciting tech projects. Contact us via Meetup or attend an event if you'd like to get involved.

Engineering it Better
A practical journey through pixels, timing, animation and constraint

What does it take to make a low-cost LED matrix display look genuinely good?

In this talk, Gary Atkinson explores the engineering behind a Raspberry Pi Pico-driven HUB75 RGB LED display system, built to produce deep colour, smooth scrolling, anti-aliased text and animated graphics from surprisingly modest hardware.

Starting with the familiar problem of “it works, but it could be better”, the talk looks at how small design choices accumulate: colour depth, gamma correction, PIO, PWM timing, memory layout, sprite rendering, animation timelines and app-driven scene authoring. Along the way, Gary will show how software, hardware and visual design have to work together when every byte, frame and microsecond matters.

This is not just a talk about driving LEDs. It is about the practical craft of engineering: understanding constraints, improving the result step by step, and turning a cheap display panel into something more polished, expressive and useful.
Whether your interest is software, hardware, embedded systems, graphics, making things, or simply understanding how better results emerge from careful technical decisions, there should be something here for everyone.

Over 18s only.

6.30pm - Setup
6.45pm - Doors open
7.00pm - Arrivals
7.30pm - Discussions, news, events
7.45pm - Engineering it better / Q/As
8.30pm - Discussions / Networking / Working on Projects
9.45pm - Suggested departure time
10.00pm - Doors closed

This talk is part of our monthly Tech Meetups in Chelmsford on the first Thursday of the month 7pm-10pm at Patch.

We're looking for people to give talks, help with organisation, promotion and recruitment, share skills with others, and work on exciting tech projects. Contact us via Meetup or attend an event if you'd like to get involved.

Join us on the 3rd Sunday of the month in Basildon Town Centre for a monthly social meetup for those interested in all things tech.
Over 18s only.

We'll be upstairs at Orleto Lounge in the middle of the town centre - next to the new cinema.

We're running free learn to code workshops for adult beginners at our monthly Southend Tech Meetups.

Please bring laptop / tablet / charger / hardware to use.
Microbits, electronics and robotics will be available for your use.

During the workshops, using a simple block based coding language, you'll learn to build fun and exciting apps and games which run on the Microbit using it's capabilities such as sound, LEDs, motion, electronics and robotics.

These workshops are great for teaching coding and cover fundamentals such as programming logic, variables, loops and more.
The micro:bit is a great introduction to the Internet of Things and robotics.

You can also progress from simple drag-and-drop coding into using professional programming languages such as Python.

All welcome, over 18s only. Meetups are on the 3rd Thursday of the month.

Entrance £3 per person payable to the shop on exit.