That’s “Hello World” in Italian, according to some random online translator! This is my new Arduino Duemilanove (2009) microcontroller, which my parents got me for Christmas. As you can see, I have followed instructions well and hooked up this LED and enabled it to blink at varying rates. This is the equivalent of the “Hello World” program in coding, the most simple unit of work you can make to verify that you’ve got the basics correct.
I’m pretty excited about this little thing. When I first saw it, I was taken back to my college microcontrollers class where we had to do this same type of thing with a big honkin’ microcontroller kit. It was a little magical to me, being able to make my computer programs affect actual hardware components… I know you can argue that I’ve been doing that all along as I’ve been coding, but its neat to control things directly at the hardware level instead of having it hidden under layers upon layers of software intended to dumb down the details.
I’m not entirely sure what playing with this thing will lead to, I had designs on learning more about proximity sensors in hopes that could help my multitouch table, but I’m not entirely sure how that would fit into the planned architecture I have for that thing. We’ll see how it shapes up, if nothing else this will make me more comfortable working with electronic components.
Very fun!