You should get an Arduino

Curiosity is an antidote to the technology haze

“beat-glove,” Jacek Spiewla, https://www.wired.com/2013/01/wearable-arduinos/

Years ago, I landed a summer job as a coach at an innovation academy. You can think of it as summer camp for geeks who like to build robots. In two-week cycles, my fellow coaches and I guided kids from age 11 to 17 through open-ended problem-solving exercises in design, fabrication, electronics, and programming. I was an experienced all-around fabrication guru, but a complete novice with anything wired. And so, alongside the campers, I experienced for the first time the various little thrills of hobbyist electronics. I learned about breadboarding, the process of quickly schematizing and laying out simple circuits. I experimented with input sensors of all kinds, learning about the actual physical difference between analog and digital signals and how to use them. I played around with hacking LEDs to output pulses how and when I wanted. I spent a lot of time Googling around for help with the simple programs the kids wanted to write as they created rickety disaster relief robots.

I have always been of two minds about technology. On the one hand, I am skeptical of its growth, its reach, its purposes, and its effects. And on the other, I'm so curious about how it all works. Do not mistake this curiosity for competency! I am a mediocre tinkerer. But what I want to propose is that we need far more mediocre tinkerers, and far fewer doom-scrollers, to re-establish our relationship with the technological world.

Our camp built its devices and robots on the Arduino, a simple and inexpensive programmable hardware device, and scavenged from a jumbled box of wires, sensors, input and output devices, motors, and other attachments to complete our projects. What I realize now is that, in those two-week cycles, we were learning a settled, ancient, and deeply human set of skills for relating to our tools. The habit of tinkering can awake us from the torpor induced by the personal devices and technologies of our day.

From Passive To Active

For one thing, tinkering takes us from being a passive consumer and user of the technology around us, to someone who takes an active part in it. It takes a mere consumer and makes her both a producer and a consumer. The world of tools and technology becomes not a set of received goods and practices, but instead a contested thing, subject to alteration or rejection by the consumer.

From Helpless To Competent

Tinkering also develops a series of small but meaningful competencies in the tinkerer. This does not mean becoming an expert in all of the fields of science and technology that one might touch. But mediocrity, or even making things worse or more basic than a consumer product is, carries with it no shame. It is not pointless because the outcome is worse; tinkering develops a deep curiosity for how things work that has far longer-lasting impact than how well some homebrew device functions in the near term.

From Magic To Matter

What this curiosity can reveal, given time and attention, is the mechanisms at work behind the surface of the devices and techniques whose inner works we assume to be magic. Learning how something works does two things for me, both of which I find productive. First, it punctures the magic balloon; it helps me to see the cause and effect of matter and energy. And second, it always fills me with wonder. Unlike the assumption that these devices are magic, an unmoored and idle wonder, this wonder is grounded instead in a dawning understanding: of the effort and time it took to design, to test, to make, and to improve this device.

Enter the Arduino

The Arduino combines two big, scary words, software and hardware, into a tiny package. It is technically a microcontroller; a small board with pins for connecting sensors, motors, switches, and other components. It also has a USB port, so that you can connect it to your computer, write some code, and have that code execute on the board.

The first time you use one, you might connect a small light sensor (an input) to the board. Then, you could write a small piece of code that would read the input and tell it to you. By itself, this isn't very interesting. But then, grab a light, connect it to the board, and have it turn on when the light sensor reads below a particular threshold. Now, you have a daylight-sensitive light all your own. If you want to control the threshold at which the light turns on, just connect a dial (another input) that you can twist back and forth to move the threshold up and down. By itself, this is simple and perhaps not very useful. But the open-ended nature of the Arduino, the many components available for it, and the profusion of interesting problems and use cases out in the world make it a great way to start tinkering.

I could write this same short paean to tinkering about any number of things. I could talk up 3D printing, which will teach you about modeling, manufacturing tolerances, the interfaces between materials, and the structural integrity of objects under stress and strain. Or machining, which will make you realize why so many objects are shaped the way they are, given the constraints you have to work with. Any of these (or all of them, working in tandem) are ways to attend to and exert influence over the world of objects and technology.

What tinkering can do is help us adopt a negotiated position, a command, over the technology we use. It can build in us ways of thinking and doing that gives us alternatives to helpless passivity. And finally, it can reveal the mechanisms behind the magic, giving us opportunities to reject—or modify to our liking—the tools we use every day.

This negotiated position does not come automatically. The manic thrill of experimentation and discovery can take the tinkerer just as surely as it took J. Robert Oppenheimer, the key scientist behind the invention of the atomic bomb. Before a hearing, he said, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." What even a modicum of technical know-how can do is to convince the tinkerer that a technology is merely its technique. A computer is just a bunch of logic gates; a large language model is just matrix math; the Internet is just a lot of networked devices, the atomic bomb is just a lot of particles.

Tinkering only begins the hard work of actually engaging with the why behind the fruits of technological advancements. Undertaken at the human scale, tinkering can make the products of technology oriented to the human only when humans undertake it with concertedly human aims. But actually undertaking this work is within reach for all of us in our own ways, and is much better than aimless malaise or unquestioning acceptance.

So pick up the Arduino, or woodworking, or rose bush cultivation, or bookbinding, or white hat hacking. Technical competency is not the province of the specially endowed. It is the reward of the tinkerer.