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ARDUINO REPORT
if you like go to the video report!
Friday 27 /October 2006 10am
Today we started a little bit later.It's 10:55am and we are listening to the arduino introduction. How did arduino get started? It was 5 years ago in Ivrea where Massimo Banzi and David Curtuaillez met at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea to teach. To teach physical computing there was the need of a circuit board that was being built differently for each student class. After many different models they thought about how to get to a functional/suitable board to work with.
Within the Arduino philosophy there are some ideas/working methodology we like to mention:
community: Arduino actually received an honour mention for the community it created around itself
open source/low costs: the Arduino software is open source and took shape out of an other open source programming languages: processing, the board is very compact and cheap in comparison to other board competitors.
Junk/Toys as a source of material/technology to build models/installation/to learn from things with an "hands on" process
Tinkering: the italian translation would be "smanettare"
Patching & Circuit bending.
Keyboard hack: a keyboard is the perfect tool to open and hack to get in an easy and cheap way a series of different control "buttons"
Arduino is an open platform that can communicate with a large number of other software packages to manipulate data in different ways according to the needs. Some examples of software are MAX MSP, Pure Data, Isadora, VVVV, Eyesweb, Processing, Flash MX, ...
What is a sensor? it's an electronic component that wants to imitate our capability to feel. Sensors can "feel" if something is warm or cold, if a person touch a surface, they can "see",...
Let's now look at the Arduino board. It's small, powerful and easy to program. Actually it's perfect for designer/architect and artists but not for expert programmers...They can't figure out how to work with something so simple!
11:33 am We are getting nearer to the board functionality explanation.
10 minutes break, someone smoke a cigarette, someone plays at table football, someone takes a coffee..
Break is over and we go on with some examples of projects realized with Arduino. Beside the technology you use the important thing is the idea behind; let's try to escape "technology for technology's sake"!
Some of the projects presented are:
by Jennifer Bove, Simone Pia and Nathan Waterhouse
by Giovanni Cannata and Anurag
Sehgal
Ciccio
Curiously Inflated Computer Controlled Interactive Object by Cliostraat, Stefano Mirti, Daniele Mancini, Walter Aprile
by Massimo Banzi,Anurag Sehgal, Giovanni Cannata, Eilean Somnitz, Andreea Chelaru, Ailadi Cortelletti, Stefano Mirti
Now it's 4:39 pm, a big jump in the middle of the afternoon, we have all downloaded and installed the IDE Integrated Environment Software and got it working, done the first exercises.
A theory break. What is electricity? Let's try to understand its logic with an analogy: electricity is like water. The tube through which the water passes is like the electrical wire, the water pressure corresponds to the voltage..
Today we stay soft and we go through the simplest examples: getting an LED blinking, a Pushbutton, ... In getting these exercises working we gain confidence with the "complile, reset, upload" process, the breadboard, the resistance values and colour codes, ..
