22 November 2009
my first duino
Yesterday I took my first tentative steps with Arduino (yes technically it was a Freeduino) thanks to the workshops at Howduino & Fizzpop. I’ve been wanting to play with duino’s for a while, but as its been over 10 years since I had to deal with electronics and circuits I hadn’t the foggiest where to start and was keen to avoid my tendency of buying ‘how to’ books to gather dust on a bookcase.
The workshops where pitched at a good level, not starting right at the bottom and assuming a basic understanding of electronics (an understanding I didn’t have). But I didn’t mind as this made the workshops more sociable as others who did understand helped us laymans muddle through together. I merrily ended the day knowing how to power and programme enough lights and buzzers to earn instant gratification and get thinking on how to implement this into something fun.
It was interesting to hear the more experienced hackers present their work at the end of the day, and that even at this level a lot of people felt compelled to apologise and confess that they hadn’t written all the code themselves or had copied circuits from others, as if it was somehow cheating to not be able to claim ownership to every step of the process.
I know I was suffering the same needless sense of guilt in the workshops and it was reassuring to hear those more experienced feel it too. It reminded me that most people aren’t experts, we all need to start somwhere and we’re all learning as we go along, sharing our ideas and projects so we can take and re-appropriate these to make them our own. Because I don’t want to be an expert….actually that’s a lie I secretly wish by some magical fluke I’d turned out to be a programming and electronics genius, but that’s impossible and besides the point…Because you don’t ‘need’ to be an expert to play, and now I can.
I don’t see any reason why reusing code created by somebody else should be considered “cheating”. Why on earth should I want to reinvent the bicycle again and again? I always find it more important to accomplish the task, rather than say to everybody that the credit is mine and only mine. That’s the beauty of Arduino as the open source hardware: you can find tons of stuff to help you get a kick start.
Great post, btw, hope you will enjoy hacking!