Phidgets Smidgets.

So we met up at Brighton Station, the three of us, Jon “Time for a Coffee” Bird, Henry and me.A pleasant journey up to Kings Cross spent discussing projects, computers and art. Much to the delight of our fellow passengers .

We met the others on the way to The Wellcome Trust and so we started the class. Massimo Banzi explained the origins of the Arduino board as a device to allow for the rapid prototyping of design ideas. He has a way of talking about technology that makes you believe that you can just start taking things apart and building machines out them. We spent the first day learning the basics of the control programmes and by 5.30 we were well “cooked on both sides”.

We were encouraged to bring various bits of redundant kit to “hack” for the next day. I brought in an old Wacom tablet as I thought it might contain some interesting possibilities and I had always wanted to see the inside of one. After chatting to Massimo about how to get some readings out of it, I attempted to solder some wires to strategic places on the circuitry. Unfortunately I succeeded in burning a large hole in it.

I decided instead to find some more detailed and challenging programming exercises on the web and found a site called “Processing Meets Arduino” which had a number of projects based on the interaction between sensors and software.

It taught me quite a lot, especially the importance of efficient and accurate electronics when putting together these sorts of systems. I speak as someone who comes from an art background who had not programmed before last month.

The workshop drew to a close with a review of everyone’s projects and the award of Tom Igoe’s book Making Things Talk to the person whose name was drawn out of a hat. We all came away from the workshop feeling inspired and well informed enough to know how to put that into practice. We look forward to Massimo’s visit in December.