The Gingerbreadtron is an interesting example of an Arduino project. A Gingerbreadtron is a gingerbread house that transforms into a robot. The project was built using an Arduino Uno board and six servo motors. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. The project began in 2005 and there are claims that over 300,000 Arduino units are “in the wild.”
According to the website, developers can use Arduino to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can communicate with software running on a computer. The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free. The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment.
My first exposure to the platform was from a friend that was using the platform to offer a product to control a lighting system. Since then, I see more examples of people using the platform in hobby projects – which leads to this week’s question – Are you using Arduino for any of your projects or production products? Is a platform that provides a layer of abstraction over the microcontroller sufficient for hardcore embedded designs, or is it a tool that allows developers that are not experts at embedded designs to more easily break into building real-world control systems?
Visit Embedded Insights to see the full conversation occurring across multiple communities about this and other questions of the week.
