Technology has got exciting these days!
Take away the buzzword-bingo and low-informative repetitive noise you get in particularin the Internet about hip things, there still remains a lot of substance being worth to deal with and surviving the inevitable hype that is made about any new thing being of broad interest.
Having these amazing Lego-parts of new and sometimes disrupting technologies at hand, it just only calls for someones creativity and fantasy what to build upon / with them:
Disruptive technologies pretty often build the groundwork for in turn other disruptive things and ideas to emerge.
So in order to start to get more concrete, here is a brief chain-of-events:
- The advent of easy-to-use Micro-Controllers like the AVR and PIC brands made it possible to a broad audience to have an in-budget access to this technology:
In the last millenium, such technology already did exist in its infancy, but was confined to professionals who were able / willing to do the necessary investment in expensive (the goal is to merge these both words together…) equipment and training in order to be able to master it. Needless to mention the lack of any kind of community here.
These new controllers emerging to popularity after the millenium brought this investment down to a fraction of the original one, thereby not missing any kind of desired feature-sophistication though. - So the costs were in control, but not the expertise yet:
Disruptive technologies like Arduino or Raspberry PI building on top of the rugged, broadly available and cheap hardware targeted their (open source) (hardware) designs in order to make the technology usable as well to people whose core-competencies are not necessarily microprocessors / electronics. Needless to say, there also grew up manifold communities.
So a new audience has been addressed with that, thereby fostering / enabling new ideas that would not have come to the world otherwise… - …and this new audience was not tired to move on:
So e.g. the popular 3D-printing technology has got attraction and progress by a “low-end” community constantly bringing the topic forward:
There can be found commonly used open-source 3D-printer electronics based upon an Arduino foundation and in turn having some standardized firmware basing in turn upon this hardware.
In turn, even 3D-Printer open source hardware-designs on top of this processing foundation have been done, as e.g. the “Josef Prusa I3”. There are even others. And all of them are interpreted (=fabricated) in a manifold way and sold in turn.
Another interesting example is CNC 3D-milling / (laser-)engraving, whereas hard- and software has a pretty similar progress as compared to 3D-printing: Specific boards have been developed taking the Arduino as a basis, and affordable hardware has been built around that, in turn avoiding to spend the fortune for such an equipment as it was used to be in the last millenium.
So in fact, hardware and software did make a progress over the past in terms of not just only having got better, but also addressing a broader audience, be it because of lower entry level of required budget or skillset.
There is doubt that such a kind of progress could replace the established ways about how to deal with the problems they should solve (this doubt in particular comes from the “establishment”). But the good message is that the situation could be seen as a “win-win”:
Problems never being solved with established technologies so far probably never would have been addressed in future using them: So the “market-shares” have not just moved, but in fact have been enhanced, bringing up new niches never served before! In turn, also established “high-end” technology profits from the overall progress and even gets better. At the end of the day, the “low-end” of the spectre anyway can be seen as the basis for the “high-end”.
And basically, the things just mentioned before are a big part (so far) of my toolset i’m using:
Electronics, Microprocessors (i always find an excuse …eeeh… reason why not to use an Arduino, but make my own dedicated design instead), 3D-printing, CNC (PCB-)milling, software / computers on all levels (PC, Cloud, Linux, Windows, RasPi, Java, HTML, Javascript, C++, Assembler, XML/XSLT, JSON … completely and only driven by requirement).
And this powerful toolset is in place to bring various things to reality, as it will be described further in this blog….
Da Vinci Space 