3 ms·

This is why we need to be supporting open and free hardware, everything else is some form of compromise. EDIT: Kodos for the moral, I'm on mobile and couldn't

• arcticbull 8y ago
  Skimming, the salient point to me was that the perspective of people there is "hardware comes in a box" rather than (in my words) "coming from the ingenuity and hard work of engineers, who are just normal people with experience in building things." It's easy to overlook, though I can point to that moment for myself when I realized this was something I loved doing: 10-year-old me going to a camp where they showed us how we could use qbasic plus some breadboards to build security systems, launch rockets, make a musical instrument -- with electronics. That's what showed me both that people make it, and that I could make it too. Whether hardware is totally open or not, if you don't have that spark, the moment that connection forms, it doesn't matter. The technology that got me going was far from open, ti was some 1990s era Compaq with a parallel port break-out most likely. I think Arduinos are 10X more powerful for getting people into this world than an open computer they couldnt even begin to understand. That's learning to sprint before you can crawl. Both matter, though.