Hardware hacking heaven at OSCON

OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.

Many software developers are astonished to find that there's nothing that hard about hardware, and a few basic skills can go a long way. Some have bemoaned that you can't hack your iPhone the way you used to be able to learn with an Apple ][, but that doesn't mean there aren't options out there.

From microcontrollers such as Arduino, through to complete systems such as the SheevaPlug and BeagleBoard, there are now many accessible form factors to enable novices and experts alike to begin experimenting and prototyping hardware systems.

via radar.oreilly.com

I wrote this piece for O'Reilly Radar about the awesome hardware sessions we've got at OSCON this year.

Jul 09, 2010

russnelson said...

I'm pleased by the amount of hardware hacking at OSCON this year. Too many programmers never fiddle with hardware. Start with Java, and you're not even running on the hardware. You're running in a virtual machine. Start with C, and you're programming in a portable assembly language. You've at least got a chance of flipping a bit in a register and watching a light come on or go off.

once bitten