Arduino – the hardware revolution

Beyond Arduino
The boards are based on the readily available Atmel AVR microcontroller, and an open source design, so making your own version is easy, and many ‘Freeduinos’ have appeared for a variety of purposes (see ‘Softly, softly’ boxout). Even the Atmel isn’t a solid requirement – as long as the interfaces and language were compatible, one could build any sort of clone. But other, unconnected kits exist that do similar things, or you can take PIC programmable microcontrollers and build your own controller boards if you are comfortable with embedded geekery – a road some people follow after successful Arduino experimentation, though they never expected to become embedded hardware hackers.

Michael Nicholls’s Arduino remote control for his camera, built with the Fizzpop hackspace, was a journey through oscillators and control square waves. Every project can be educational as well as fun – in fact, shouldn’t life always carry these two elements? Camera remotes are a popular project, but those wishing to make them smaller move beyond the Arduino and develop custom boards.

For Abdul A Saleh and Aisha Yusuf, the Arduino was a stage on the journey as they hacked hardware for a device that plugged into ordinary radios until they realised that a web-based service would serve better for their startup idea, a way of finding related talk shows. It may now point to podcasts, rather than retune radios, but “it certainly became the impetus to what we’re doing now,” says Yusuf.

Digging around the friendly world of Arduino hackers you find many startups, micro-businesses and great little enterprises from makers, sellers and trainers, as well as artists and performers. Some, like .:oomlout:., fit all of the above categories. Many people have gone from following the hardware route to open source, to following their dreams. Just as mobile internet, laptops and coffee shops have enabled digital creatives to go freelance with low overheads, so the dedicated hardware hacker needs her own co-working space with low rent, and plenty of creative people around. To meet this need, the hackspace has finally arrived in the UK.

Hackerspaces
If the netbook did not quite make 2009 the ‘year of Linux on the desktop’, it did see the belated arrival of the hackspace (or hackerspace) on these shores, with groups forming in Birmingham, Brighton, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Shrewsbury, Stoke-on-Trent and York, with Manchester accounting for two distinct (and co-operating) spaces.

Build it yourself, don’t buy it – a hacker ethos that chimes well with our times, as queues for allotments lengthen and national newspapers publish supplements on economical living. This is not ‘make do and mend’, our parents’ legacy from wartime rationing and postwar austerity, but a post-consumer rush to find some value beyond ‘I am what I consume’, by a deeper involvement in the things that surround us. Yet it is more than just a move to make and be involved: everywhere Arduino projects, and the more complicated outputs of hackerspaces and the new craft movement, show a real sense of playfulness – and an ease with, rather than rejection of, the technological world.

Homo sapiens are the only race defined by the things with which they surround themselves, and cannot survive without the tools that they make. Archaeological findings have shown that stone-age Neanderthals, living in caves and, with no agriculture, surviving on food they could gather and hunt, spent their precious spare hours making jewellery and make-up. It seems the urge to play, adorn and have fun is fundamental to what we are – and the hackers and artists who use the Arduino board to have fun with technology are not nerds, nor cool and cutting-edge artists, but the simple embodiment of the spirit of the age.

Richard Smedley
Richard  is a social entrepreneur, founder of hackspace NW, permaculture designer, part-time sysadmin and busy father of three. Hacked discrete electronics for fun in the early ’80s, now hacks allotment

This article is part of a larger feature published in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

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