Recently I have started wondering how I can expand myself in programming and software development. For a while it seems like I have not been making much progress forward. So I attended the Tech4Africa conference with a friend of mine, and one of the things I learnt about during the conference was Ardunio electronic kits.

Part of my history includes loving electronics as a child, and all that I wanted to do was to attend the technical high school where I would learn about electronics. I did really well at school, and just missed being the top student in the class. And after school I had hoped to attend Teknickon to study electronics further, however that plan was stumped when my application was rejected and they accepted me for heavy current, which I turned down as I was not interested in heavy current. So I ended up doing a BCom majoring in Infomatics. I did really well in my programming and IT classes, and eventually ended up taking a short Java programming course with VZAP after I finished my degree. And that took me into the world of being a software developer which I have been doing for the last 10 years.

Now it’s like a flood coming back to me, diving yet once again back into the world of electronic, but not just any electronics, the nice thing about the Ardunio kits is that one can write small programs which are uploaded into the micro-controller to control the behaviour of the chip.

You can program the chip to listen for buttons being pressed, and then do things like turns LEDs on when the button is pressed. And as you’ll see in the video you can change the behaviour quite easily by manipulating the program, so when the button is pressed you don’t just have the light turning on, but you can control different lights to turn on and in different patterns.

Basically the Ardunio allows one to write programs to allow a computer to interact with the outside world. I am looking forward to making more complex projects than the one seen in the video. Keep coming back here for updates, and if you have any experiences with Ardunio programming or have any questions or comments, please post away and I’ll respond.