Hi, Internet.

This is my first post here, so I guess I should introduce myself, but I won’t. There will be plenty of time for that later.  Anyway, I bought my first Arduino around the end of 2011, and got sucked into it badly. Since then, although I’m still not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I did learn a lot about Arduino, electronics, microcontrollers, Making in general – and the people involved with them.  This knowledge I wish to share with you now, so…

Like many, I was led to believe back then that the Arduino was kind of a simple little computer, that you could connect directly to electronic stuff. In a sense it IS, and that’s exactly why it’s so successful. However, behind the literally Plug-and-Play facade, there lies a mean mountain goat which is the bane of all beginners.

You see, microcontrollers – such as the ATmega328 that lies at the heart of the common Arduino Uno – were not designed with hobbyists and noobs in mind. These are industrial devices, built around industrial constraints and considerations. They are all about maximizing the performance-to-cost ratio, and although some of them may be friendlier than others, friendliness was never part of the equation.  Microcontrollers can do lots of impressive stuff, like mountain goats, but saddling them up and riding them, well…

Massimo Banzi and the other Arduino developers did something amazing: they put a really soft and comfortable saddle on this goat, and by that made the technology accessible to a much wider public.  The thing is, whenever anyone tries to ride the beast out of the comfortable little goat farm, troubles begin. You know what I mean: timer conflicts, timing issues, component current and voltage issues, overweight code libraries… It’s quite possible that confronting these problems seriously may require as much willpower and resilience as learning microcontrollers the old fashioned way; too many hobbyists stop at this point and either choose to stay at their noobish comfort zone, or quit entirely.

In this blog, I will do my little part in trying to fix this situation. I’ll discuss my own experience with microcontrollers and programming, in a way which will be (I hope) entertaining and informative. We’ll have tutorials for absolute beginners, advanced stuff, interesting stories and anecdotes, you name it. We’ll learn to appreciate the mountain goat for what it really is.

Please join me in my future posts. See you soon!