Arduino hackathon

Today I helped teach an Arduino course at the Reykjavík Hackerspace (Hakkavélin), as part of the Raflosti electronic music festival. We weren’t focusing so much on music as much as just the general ability to create electronic art, generally using Arduino as a foundation piece.

Áki Ásgeirsson did the introduction, running through a great bunch of examples of Arduinos being used in art, ending with my personal favorite, the laser harp:

Then I took over and ran very quickly through the different abstraction layers that underlie software: Nature, measurements, Maxwell’s equations, the lump matter discipline, semiconductors, logic gates, integrated circuits and software. I really like seeing the abstractions laid out like that, it makes the concept of programming seem so much more … real.

Then I demonstrated Processing, Fritzing and the Arduino development software, and we constructed a tiny example before breaking off into ad-hoc groups and hacking happily.

There will be many more hackathons like this. We’ve already started talking about doing another Arduino gig with slightly more advanced. But it’ll all be discussed at the Tuesday meeting – Grandagarður 16, 101 Reykjavík, 20:00.