A 20:20 talk at XTech 2007

1. This 20-slides-20-seconds talk is about ubiquitous computing and hacking your own hardware.

2. This is what hardware hacking used to be like. There was a lot of soldering and printed circuit
boards.

3. Massimo Banzi and friends decided to make it easier.

4. They created Arduino, a hardware prototyping board, named after a former king of Ivrea in Italy.

5. The schematic for this prototyping board is creative commons licensed. You can make your own if
you like.

6. But making your own boards is a pain.

7. So I buy nice Made In Italy ones readymade.

8. There are a few varieties - bluetooth, usb, mini

9. The bluetooth one is particularly nice because if you power it by battery it’s a completely
autonomous computing device.

10. Arduino has an open-source IDE which compiles and uploads code to the board for you.

11. There’s also an Applescript proxy for the Mac that lets you make hardware that controls your
software

12. according to wikipedia the average english-
speaking adult can read about three hundred
words per minute. so this slide contains exactly
one hundred words which will occupy your
attention for the next twenty seconds. this will
let me talk a little longer about the content on
the last slide which I'm surely I haven't yet
finished waffling about.
it's surprising how much you can say in one
hundred words, and how quickly you run out of
ideas when writing them. kittens. kittens are
nice. everyone likes kittens. that's 86 words,
and here a few more. did you get here in twenty
The core of Arduino is a microcontroller, designed to interface with sensors and other electronics.
Wikipedia defines a microcontroller as “a computer-on-a-chip. It is a type of microprocessor
emphasizing self-suficiency and cost-eectiveness, in contrast to a general-purpose
microprocessor (the kind used in a PC).”

13. It’s not hard to wire up a few cheap components and make your own hardware toys

14. Or you can buy readymade components from tinker.it that are even easier to plug together

15. There are many components available

16. Some are simple, like this slider.

17. And some are complex, like this LCD display

18. Hardware hacking can be easy and fun. We took a simple cheap remote-control car

19. and modified it to have bluetooth control. Yes, this is a mess. So was my first CGI, and now look at
me.

20. Go find and more. Write code that makes things happen in the real world.