Arduino: Open Source Hardware Hacking from the Software Nerd Perspective

You may be the master of software and the kind of open source, hacking web apps by day and device drivers by night, but there’s still a thrill in a handheld, physical device. It’s even better when it’s all open source.

Enter the Arduino, a micro-controller-based prototyping and physical computing platform. It’s the brains, but includes loads of analog inputs, and digital inputs and outputs, to read sensors and drive motors and LEDs. The Arduino is both inexpensive and completely open source: from the PCB board layout to the boot loader, to the standard libraries, to the IDE and other development tools. Even most of its extensions, or shields, are open source.

I hadn’t touched a soldering iron in nearly two decades (after picking one up by the wrong end) but that didn’t stop me from getting bitten by the hardware bug. You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to get started with the Arduino, just be able to follow some simple guidelines and be prepared to experiment.

We’ll cover the basic electronics you need to know (mostly LEDs and resistors), the programming language (C with a smidgen of C++), and show just how easy it is for software-only nerds to get their feet wet in the world of physical computing.