Getting Started with Arduino

Chapter 2. The Arduino Way

The Arduino philosophy is based on making designs rather than talking about them. It is a constant search for faster and more powerful ways to build better prototypes. We have explored many prototyping techniques and developed ways of thinking with our hands.

Classic engineering relies on a strict process for getting from A to B; the Arduino Way delights in the possibility of getting lost on the way and finding C instead.

This is the tinkering process that we are so fond of—playing with the medium in an open-ended way and finding the unexpected. In this search for ways to build better prototypes, we also selected a number of software packages that enable the process of constant manipulation of the software and hardware medium.

The next few sections present some philosophies, events, and pioneers that have inspired the Arduino Way.

Prototyping

Prototyping is at the heart of the Arduino Way: we make things and build objects that interact with other objects, people, and networks. We strive to find a simpler and faster way to prototype in the cheapest possible way.

A lot of beginners approaching electronics for the first time think that they have to learn how to build everything from scratch. This is a waste of energy: what you want is to be able to confirm that something's working very quickly so that you can motivate yourself to take the next step or maybe even motivate somebody else to give you a lot of cash to do it.

This is why we developed "opportunistic prototyping": ...