A post about Arduino class and my own accidental assholery.
Back To School Time
Okay, so I’ve spent a couple of weeks fiddling around with the Arduino IDE and coming up with programming metaphors, but when I saw on Twitter that a certain hackerspace near my home was having an intro Arduino class on Saturday, I was in. The class was taught by Nick Vermeer, a very cool fella who was one of the collaborators on this awesome light-up costume project with the Brooklyn Ballet using NeoPixels and Floras and Gemmas and accelerometers and all the things. (Interesting side note: Nick pronounced Adafuit like "Add-a-fruit" which made me question everything until I could confirm that my "Aid-a-fruit" pronunciation was also acceptable)
Um… didn’t you already teach yourself the intro stuff?
Maybe. But what if I missed something? What if I don’t even know enough to know what I don’t know? And reinforcement is always good, right? Plus, I love school. I’ve always loved school. There’s something about the collaborative environment, the structure, and the frame of mind in which school puts one. Sure, Hunky Assistant offered to teach me these things himself. But I wasn’t really into it. I didn’t know why until I climbed all those stairs and got into the class itself on Saturday. It was then that I realized something…
It’s all about the ego, baby
I honestly didn’t know this about myself until sitting there amidst eight other aspiring makers halfway through the class, but I like school because I like the feeling of knowing more than the person next to me. Not that I want them to know less, but those moments of realization--when I could figure out something that another person was struggling with--were powerful demonstrations of knowledge. They performed my competence for myself. And boy does it make me want to keep programming. If this had just been a one-on-one with my Hunky Assistant, I would have only felt the deep gulf between our knowledge levels (he started programming at age 12 and has a master’s degree in computer engineering). But in a class with relative peers, I could see just how far I’ve been inching across that gaping void. It was like I was struggling up a big mountain and suddenly looked up to see an amazing view stretched out before me.
So what did you actually learn… like, about Arduino?
Nick gave us an Arduino Uno and a cute little breadboard and a whole smorgasbord of inputs and sensors including a potentiometer, some buttons, a temperature sensor, and a light sensor. We started out fiddling with the Blink program and moved on to working with input pins and using the button to control an LED. Then we got into ASCII characters and printing "Hello World" and then setting up and reading serial ports--which is going to be super helpful as I try to turn my accelerometer readings into data for controlling NeoPixels. We mostly just messed around with basic code and electronic configurations and worked things out together.
The Great Fahrenheit Eureka Moment
The most helpful part for me, I think, was understanding that sometimes you have to write multiple functions to translate input information into useful information. For instance, once we got the temperature sensor working (after I put it in the breadboard backwards and it heated up so quickly that I nearly burned myself pulling the thing out), we were reading the data in volts and then converting that to celcius. I figured out on my own that I could then create another function translating celsius into fahrenheit (you just take the celsius variable and multiply by 9, divide by 5, and add 32). And I made it happen. Another little boost to the ‘ole ego.
Also, NYC Resistor is a magical tech treehouse
If you ever have the chance to go, do it. I’m probably going back on Thursday for their weekly open Craft Night. Really cool people, many of them women. I’ve been a couple of times before, mostly just tagging along with friends. But now that I have a project of my own, I really feel like I have a reason and purpose for visiting. I feel legit. (2 legit 2 quit)
