Fun on the river with oomlout's Arduino starter kit

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I've just got back home after an enjoyable afternoon introducing my brother-in-law to the Arduino. He's a designer by profession. He lives on a Dutch barge near Canary wharf, so he's a competent electrician, but he's new to embedded hardware and micro controllers.

(If you want a quiet but luxurious place to stay in Docklands with a 5 star breakfast, take a look at their website).

I took along oomlout's excellent ARDX arduino starter kit, and by the afternoon he was tweaking happily tweaking example sketches. He now sees why I find the embedded world so exciting, and I hope he'll be contributing to our Raspberry Pi-based projects at quick2wire.

At the end of our session we started talking about CAD for electronics. As a designer he uses CAD a lot and wondered what CAD tools were used for electronics. Since we'd spent the afternoon working with a breadboard, I showed him Fritzing, When he saw how easy it was to lay out a breadboard circuit, then go to a schematic and a PCB layout it blew him away.

"Is that used in schools?" he asked.

Not yet, that I know of, but it soon will be if we have our way :)


Comments

  1. Unknown23 February 2012 at 14:34

    Hi ! Fritzing has been developed by a german university, so somehow it comes from the schools.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Romilly Cocking23 February 2012 at 14:46

    Good point! And I know a lot of young experimenters who love it already.

    ReplyDelete

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