CMU School of Drama


Saturday, January 15, 2011

Everything Worth Knowing About Arduino

Gizmodo: "Arduino! It's a wonderful thing, this open source hardware, and it pops up around here quite often. You can't get much better of an arduino primer—both what it is and where it came from—than this brilliant documentary.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

So many things to comment on!

I was introduced to Arduinos last semester by classmates at the ETC. Much like many interviewees in the video, I'm lamenting only discovering them in my first year of grad school. What's remarkable is that using an Arduino gives you an understanding of circuits and processing and code/software, but what is inspiring about Arduinos is the potential. It seems from the documentary that the creators clued into the vast potentials early on. What's more, it was developed into a community that understood the potential of open-source for expanding Arduinos more than privatizing or commercializing ever would. Thanks to the internet, you can really see the effects and value of developing open source products - how quickly and diversely they continue to expand and how it fosters a highly creative community of designers, hackers, and artists.

As the audience for Arduino grows, I'm interested in the potential of use in performance. For a project last semester, we used the Arduino Lillypad to include a wearable element of an interactive performance/world. Developing that and looking at the vast variety of sensors, microcontrollers are poised to really enhance performances with technology, so long as someone on the design team knows about them and brings them to the table - which is part of what makes me so excited to see this story on this blog.