As I
mentioned some time ago, the announcement that Google were adopting the Arduino
open-source hardware platform for Android phones smacked me in the forehead
like a well-aimed Cricket bat. I’ve never been a great proponent of open source
but the idea of open source hardware
somehow pushed my buttons (see what I did there?) Anyhoo, hacking, making,
re-purposing and general interest in electronic hardware fiddling has
resurfaced in a big way recently. Even in political circles, a realization that
so many people are consumers of “stuff” and yet not many have the faintest
inkling of how that stuff really works. Eric Schmidt tore the British Government
off a strip for allowing education to bypass technical subjects (and rightly so
Eric!) so now there is a scurry to create classes that teach programming in
schools.
I am about
to don my grandfatherly hat now and say things that I shuddered to hear when my
own grandfather spake them many years ago. He said (and I reiterate) “Young
folks of today have no clue of what it was like in my day, we had to….” and then he went off on a long rant about
bicycles and motorbike engines and how to make a steam engine out of discarded
tin cans. I feel the same way about kids who consume XBox 360 games or Facebook
apps without the slightest understanding of how a computer program functions or
having never had to sit through the annoying whistle of a Sinclair Spectrum
program that one wrote oneself loading via tape-cassette.I began my career as a radio and T.V. engineer fixing things that still had vacuum tubes in. I had to know what a triode valve did and how to do the math to allow me to bias one correctly. Later, I wrote software in assembly language which drove the MIDI equipment I had designed and today, I have come full circle because I am still looking up the functions of TTL and CMOS integrated circuits to complete my designs for electronical gizmos that I am creating.
Lately, I have become aware that the desire for real understanding has surfaced again. We want children to learn Ohm’s law and to be able to actually program the computers that they use. Why? Because if we don’t, the next generation of electronic design engineers will suffer the same fate that this generation’s chemical engineers have suffered. There won’t be enough young people to take over the task of designing and building tomorrow’s iPad or tri-corder or whatever is needed. This is scary. I challenge you to find 10 people that you know and ask them what a spark-plug does. If more than four of them even know that one goes in a car engine I will be surprised. Then ask them where a nand gate is used…
I have begun a series of videos, soon to be released, that show how to make clever stuff with things like Arduino or PIC or Propeller microcontrollers. I have proven to myself that I can program an Arduino using Visual Studio 2010 and that I can use cheap or even free tools to create seriously cool electronics. There is a new move towards comprehending our complicated world and simplifying it in such a way that kids can grow up in it without thinking that they must consume but cannot control. The time for re-understanding has arrived. Be part of it!
