Fran's Blog

It’s 1am and I really should be going to bed. I received my Arduino board today which, for me, is very exciting. I had a few problems setting it up (nothing more than user error, by not selecting the right board). First stop was to get the light flashing, which I did, then to make a simple circuit with a button to light an LED. I then customised it up a bit to play about. And here’s where I got to.

I’ll finish here, it’s quite a thing re-learning stuff you learned at school roughly 16 years ago. Looking at ohm ratings for resistors, but the fun is all there! Just a nice little hobby to pick up, start from the start and then be able to get some decent little projects going once you’re a bit better at it. At this point, it’s just me and the learning curve.

I am waiting impatiently for something I have been looking for for a while now. A way of programming hardware in a fairly easy way, being able to build circuits and make real life things work. This thing I speak of is called an Arduino Board. There are other controller boards out there, but this is the one which is open source and has a huge community. Projects show how creative developers can get.

Arduino was built to be a simple device for artists to build cool installations. More recently, developers have become more aware of it and have created projects like Baker Tweet from the tech team at Poke and the singing sock puppet (see below).

Singing Sock Puppet & The Meters – Blues in F from Matt Brown on Vimeo.

I’m excited, very excited. I was pretty damn good at circuits at school, so something like this is potentially a dream come true, in a very, very geeky way, which is what I love. Come on Mr Postman, deliver me my board!