Subluminal

“Once upon a time, there were two kids in a garage, playing with electronics.
Later, they eventually  founded HP.”

We have all heard this story, or Wozniak’s or some other Silicon Valley founding myths, and we are now sorry to observe that this era is over.

It is over, because technology have got so horribly complicated : you will never be able to wire an lcd screen to a simple battery and come up with a displayed message. You always need microcontrollers that you can’t control, or registers that you can’t register.

But something changed : one day came Arduino.

Arduino is a cheap (30$) ready-to-use open-source microcontroller, with built-in in-and-outputs, that lets you easily take control of electronic parts, such as LED, speakers, motors or servo, through programs you write in C. You can add ‘shields’, which allow you to implement new functionnalities, such as wireless communiction or data storage.
You can make really cool stuff (I only made a small light guitar, for I had no fancy laser like this guy…)

Then came Beagle board, which is a nothing less than a smartphone without the screen. The project was born when Texas Instrument engineers noticed that there were no cheap and highly tunable alternative to computers. So they made a cheap (150$), ARM-based board that have all the functionalities of a small computer that you can use for any kind of personnal project.

The newcomer is Raspberry Pi, which share both Arduino and Beagleboard assets. It is very, very cheap (35$), while it can still be plugged to a computer screen to play HD video, has USB and SD card reader. The project is supported by Cambridge, and is serious threat to Negroponte’s OLPC !

Computers did not kill Lego. Lego have just changed their names : children now have computers and DIY!