model = 0xd7
“I made it blink! Can you believe that? It blinks, and if I press this button, it blinks faster.”
This is probably what a 3-year-old kid would ecstatically shout out after getting their hands on a new toy with blinking lights. Coincidently, this is also what went through my head as I completed my very first Arduino circuit with a button and a LED. I’m pretty sure I was even more excited than the kid. But let’s rewind a bit.
And when I say a bit, I mean a lot. Building stuff has always been one of the things humans were good at. Really, really good at. Good old Homo habilis made some cool tools from stone flakes, which gave them an edge over other species, medieval inventors built incredible war machines, the Wright brothers made a bunch of planks and canvas fly, and Elon Musk proved that electric cars can drive fast and look good. The desire to build something is simply engraved in our DNA, and is one of the main drivers of progress.
As a kid, I spent most of my summer holidays with my grandparents, creating and inventing amazing things with my granddad, including model gliders and a racing kart with a chassis from a stroller. I also spent millions of hours playing around with LEGO, gutting other toys to use their small DC engines and shafts to power my LEGO truck. The problem is that nowadays it is becoming more and more difficult to create something physical, something to put on a shelf or to show to your girlfriend. The outcome of a lot of people’s work is often something extremely immaterial, like a formula or an IT feature. I mean, I am really excited about user segmentation, but it is quite difficult to come to someone and show it to them.
“Hey, here, look at this, touch it, I made this! It’s amazing!”
It is understandable that once in a while this desire to really create something physical bursts out and then, at least in my case, I spend endless hours looking on YouTube videos of extremely skilled people making knifes or other tools, wishing I could do the same. Unfortunately, my one bedroom Prenzlauer Berg apartment is not the best place for a furnace and a belt grinder, which sent me looking for something else I could do.
This is the moment when Arduino comes into play. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, Arduino is a small programmable thingie, which allows even complete amateurs to program and interact with other electronics, like LEDs, servos, thermosensors, and other silly components. You can simply imagine it as a toy for big (and slightly geeky) boys. Few weeks ago I ordered a starter set on Amazon, and few Euros and an Amazon Prime deliver later, I was holding my very own Arduino, together with a bunch of components to play around with.
Suddenly, I felt like I became a creator. I felt empowered.
This whole thing tied together yesterday evening, when I started another small project to learn how things work. My goal was to build a little system that would allow me to use my Apple Remote to control the colors of an RGB LED. Yeah, super useful, I know.
After several hours of work, which included wiring everything together on a breadboard, analyzing what codes my model of the remote uses, writing some C and ruby scripts to help me figure out the correct magic numbers, one PR, and a lot of stupid mistakes (TIL if you connect both pins of an IR sensor to GND, it’s not going to work), I had my thing, my little modern stone flake tool. Needless to say, I spent way too much time playing around with it, switching colors around and admiring the result, like the little 3-year-old kid.
What was important for me after all of that was not the result itself, but rather the sense of accomplishment. In the time when people build particle accelerators from scrap parts, I felt really proud for building something like my little circuit, even if it is kind of silly and utterly useless. Though a big portion of the work was still very non-physical (writing code), the final product was there, sitting on my desk, all wires neatly arranged, radiating a blinding purple glow (those RGB LEDs are powerful). I felt a bit like the caveman, presenting a new scraper to his wife, after carefully chipping away pieces of stone for hours. I mean, it was their 5th anniversary after all.
