I went to the Automation Fair at Club Workshop with pretty much no expectations, and I have to say that those were met. There was only one table set up with the Arduino conspicuously present. So, I'll give the folks at Mad Scientist Hut a shout-out for that. I spent some time chatting with them, and they're very decent folks. I was impressed by their use of Lego bricks for prototyping. I was somewhat surprised to see no representation from SparkFun.
By far, the star of the show (IMHO) was the 10-shot autoloading pneumatic tennis ball canon. Not really "automation" as most would consider the term, however. Yes, there were robots and autonomous vehicles in attendance, including a nicely done dune-buggy sort of thing with a school bus body, using an ARM processor, and a dancing robot which I didn't get close enough to look at, due to the insufferable subwoofer. 