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

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

Massimo Banzi and friends decided to make it easier.

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

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

But making your own boards is a pain.

So I buy nice Made In Italy ones readymade.

There are a few varieties - bluetooth, usb, mini

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

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

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

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-sufficiency and cost-effectiveness, in contrast to a general-purpose microprocessor (the kind used in a PC).”

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

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

There are many components available

Some are simple, like this slider.

And some are complex, like this LCD display

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

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

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