What Bill said. It's the gateway drug for electronics. They even make you use it in some schools! Anything that gets people away from the TV and hacking is a good thing.

Seriously, though, in order to use much of anything beyond the "hello world" sketches, you need to learn at least a little bit about basic electronics. 

It's all roses.

-Pete

On Mar 24, 2010, at 11:05 PM, William Chops Westfield wrote:

> 
> On Mar 24, 2010, at 4:23 PM, M.L. wrote:
> 
>> What function do you see the Arduino serving?
> 
> It occupies the same niche as The Basic Stamp, or the BASIC52 boards  
> before that, except that Arduino is cheaper, more flexible, and more  
> broadly supported.
> 
>> 1. I don't know if people are actually learning anything. You seem to
>> get enthusiasts who know a LOT about the Arduino as a unit, who don't
>> care that an Arduino is a microcontroller on a board that runs machine
>> code from flash memory.
> 
> Cool.
> 
>> 2. But: It seems like a lot of people who wouldn't have the background
>> to get into electronics for whatever reason are able to do really cool
>> things using the Arduino.
> 
> Doubly cool.  The way I see it, there are all sorts of neat things to  
> be done in the world where the answer is "you should use a  
> microcontroller."  The Arduino environment lets people do that without  
> having to have the background in electronics or programming that  
> microcontroller use generally used to require.  (Like I said; the  
> Basic Stamp did similar things.)
> 
>> 3. However: I wonder if the Make culture steals enthusiasm from
>> hobbyists who might have become e.g. readers of Circuit Cellar, Nuts
>> and Volts, CQ, thus replacing their resistors-and-transistors
>> knowledge with "sparkfun sells a board for that" mentality.
> 
> Nah.  Or rather, I bet that the overall flow of enthusiasm is in the  
> other direction - "we" pick up more people on the technology side than  
> are lost to the "modular" side.  Unlike the Basic Stamp, for instance,  
> the open-source nature of Arduino encourages re-spinning the final  
> version of a project as custom-made electronics.
> 
> BillW
> 
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