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2010-07-23 Status Update - Arduino, Hackerspaces, and Gothic Punk |
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Written by Akiba
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Friday, 23 July 2010 |
So far, it’s been a pretty interesting and eventful year but extremely busy, so I decided to take a short summer break. I wanted to take some time off to do stuff I’ve been interested in but been putting off because of all the tasks I’m dealing with every day. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the Arduino platform. I bought my first Arduino a couple of weeks ago but never had a chance to play with it so this was the perfect chance to get my hands dirty with it.
My first run at the Arduino was quite an enjoyable experience. I can see how it’s become such a useful platform for hobbyists and enthusiasts because it’s a very quick and easy way to prototype designs without having to build or port your own libraries.
The main reason I’ve been looking into the Arduino is because I’m trying to find an easier way to teach embedded electronics and programming to people at the hackerspace. Microcontrollers are fine and dandy, but setting up the toolchain, building from the command line, and tweaking a bunch of registers can get fairly intimidating to people that don’t do it on a regular basis.
Hence I bought my first Arduino a few weeks back so that I could see firsthand how it was used. It was very refreshing since you can get up and running quickly and comes with plenty of example code. I worked through a couple of examples when I decided that what I really wanted was a command line interface that I could call the functions in my sketch from. It’s something I use on a regular basis on my embedded designs and helps immensely.
There are quite a few command line shells out there for the Arduino, but what I wanted was just something simple that would allow me to execute functions from a terminal. Also, writing it would give me a chance to see how to integrate my own libraries into the Arduino platform. I never really intended it as a releasable project because I was just doing it to see if I could do it. But after I got it running, I figured it might be useful for other people too. The amazing thing was that it was up and running in a single day, and on my first day with the Arduino. So I’m now a convert and will be putting together an Arduino class for the Tokyo Hackerspace. It’s definitely a nice first stepping stone for people looking to learn embedded development.
In the short rest interval I gave myself, I also got the chance to meet and hang out with Raphael Abrams and his girlfriend, Deanna from NYC Resistor. They were on a trip to Tokyo and I took them around on a tour of Akihabara and Fabric Town. Raphael was one of the founders of NYC Resistor, which is a popular hackerspace in New York, and it was nice hearing about the problems they had when they first started. A lot of the issues are the same ones that we went through or are going through in Tokyo Hackerspace so hearing that we’re not a deviant hackerspace is pretty reassuring.
We also got invited to check out a gig by one of the regulars at Tokyo Hackerspace. She’s in a gothic punk band and they were doing a live show at an underground club in Tokyo. We actually helped her build electroluminescent arm bands for her stage costume at the hackerspace so she wanted us to check them out on stage. It was a very different crowd that I’m normally used to hanging out with, but was intensely interesting. I didn’t realize that gothic and cyberpunk bands use so many techie stage props. I couldn’t stop thinking that we could really just pimp out the stage for some of the bands. I suspect you might be hearing more about it in the near future.
Well, that’s about it for now. Gonna go and enjoy a cold beer and some anime on the patio now. Here’s some pics of my recent adventures in Tokyo…
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