Massimo Banzi - Getting Started with Arduino: The Open Source Electronics Prototyping Platform, 4th Edition

• 2022-02-11: First Release

A few years ago I was given a very interesting challenge: teach designers the bare minimum in electronics so that they could build interactive prototypes of the objects they were designing.

I started following a subconscious instinct to teach electronics the same way I was taught in school. Later on I realised that it simply wasnt working as well as I would like, and I started to remember sitting in a class, bored like hell, listening to all that theory being thrown at me without any practical application for it .

In reality, when I was in school I already knew electronics in a very empirical way: very little theory, but a lot of hands-on experience.

I started thinking about the process by which I really learned electronics:

• I took apart any electronic device I could put my hands on.
• I slowly learned what all those components were.
• I began to tinker with them, changing some of the connections inside of them and seeing what happened to the device: usually something between an explosion and a puff of smoke.
• I started building some kits sold by electronics magazines.
• I combined devices I had hacked, and repurposed kits and other circuits that I found in magazines to make them do new things.

As a little kid, I was always fascinated by discovering how things work; therefore, I used to take them apart. This passion grew as I targeted any unused object in the house and then took it apart into small bits. Eventually, people brought all sorts of devices for me to dissect. My biggest projects at the time were a dishwasher and an early computer that came from an insurance office, which had a huge printer, electronics cards, magnetic card readers, and many other parts that proved very interesting and challenging to completely take apart.

After quite a lot of this dissecting, I knew what electronic components were and roughly what they did. On top of that, my house was full of old electronics magazines that my father must have bought at the beginning of the 1970s. I spent hours reading the articles and looking at the circuit diagrams without understanding very much.

This process of reading the articles over and over, with the benefit of knowledge acquired while taking apart circuits, created a slow, virtuous circle.

A great breakthrough came one Christmas, when my dad gave me a kit that allowed teenagers to learn about electronics. Every component was housed in a plastic cube that would magnetically snap together with other cubes, establishing a connection; the electronic symbol was written on top. Little did I know that the toy was also a landmark of German design, because Dieter Rams designed it back in the 1960s.

With this new tool, I could quickly put together circuits and try them out to see what happened. The prototyping cycle was getting shorter and shorter.

After that, I built radios, amplifiers, circuits that would produce horrible noises and nice sounds, rain sensors, and tiny robots.

Ive spent a long time looking for an English word that would sum up that way of working without a specific plan, starting with one idea and ending up with a completely unexpected result. Finally, tinkering came along. I recognised how this word has been used in many other fields to describe a way of operating and to portray people who set out on a path of exploration. For example, the generation of French directors who gave birth to the Nouvelle Vague were called the tinkerers. The best definition of tinkering that Ive ever found comes from an exhibition held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco:

Tinkering is what happens when you try something you dont quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructionsbut there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. Its about figuring out how things work and reworking them.