Why an engineering blog?
by Massimo Banzi
I started building electronics as a kid with almost zero knowledge about the theory behind it and how to design circuits but I had access to one important tool: lots and lots of electronics magazines. We’re talking pre-microcontrollers era magazines where everything was built with resistors, capacitors, transistors and the like. I spent a lot of time learning how circuits work by looking at them in the magazines. I bought some of the kits they made, assembled them, studied them and iterated. Sometimes something would go up in smoke or even explode but that was part of the intuitive learning process. The articles explained bits of the theory behind the circuits, how they operated. Everyday electronics objects where “locked” hiding the secrets of the way they worked while the projects on the magazines gave me access to the thinking behind the project.
The behind the scene rationale, in the Open Source world is described as the “secret sauce”, how each open source development team designs and writes the HW and SW they release. It is common wisdom that the secret sauce is something that makes the business model viable: You make the output visible to anyone but you hide how you got there
Arduino being undoubtedly one of the largest developer communities in the world has enabled literally millions of people to learn about electronics and use it as a creative medium, the projects our users make surprise us every day.
One of the most beautiful aspects of our work is that it allows people to learn by looking at what we do. Even if they don’t know much about electronics, studying circuit diagrams, PCBs, software gives them an understanding of how you solve problems, how you build systems that work well and last for a long time.
In our mission to empower people through open technology we decided we wanted to tell you a bit more about how we build things, some of the decisions and the rationale behind some of the choices. We want our teams, who build the tools that you use every day, to open up about their work including areas that are less discussed like Interaction Design which is one of the topics Arduino invests a lot of effort in.
We want you to have more access to how we make things because we are very proud of the work we do and the contributions we make to the world.
If you like what we do, you can join us and help us build tools the whole world uses. (Check out the job openings here )
Massimo Banzi on behalf of the Arduino engineering and design teams.
