Lately, I’ve been working with Arduinos. If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially a way for anyone to build their own intelligent hardware. There is a microcontroller (essentially, a really small and underpowered CPU), infrastructure to support programming it, and a series of ports that can be connected to sensors, motors, and the like.
The Arduino has two major advantages that catapulted it into consciousness: it is open source, which makes it really easy to debug and extend; and it is exceedingly well-documented and reliable.
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