I’ve been aware of Wiring for  a good few years now, and have been watching it develop.  It’s a sister project to Processing – so the language is very similar, the difference being Wiring is designed to allow you to create programs that run off of a electronic board, and micro-controller.

Here is a quote from the site

Wiring is an open source programming environment and electronics i/o board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible media aspects.

A friend of mine was selling some wiring boards, and on an impulse I bought one.  The next step was for me to try and  get it working on Linux – and I have to say Hernando Barragán (the guy behind wiring) was a star and helped no end – so that I could get it working on my distro of Linux.

I’ve had an interest in tangible computing for a long time, but never really done anything practical.  So I am looking forward to a new hobby!  The only thing that is holding me back is what I want to do first with it! – so any ideas then please feel free to comment.  I was toying with the idea of creating some sort of novel device for interfacing sound exploration.  At present I am not sure – I’ll be exploring the language, and what it can and can’t do before I come to any firm conclusions on what I want to “create”.  You never know it might just be a system that uses various sensors to keep track of conditions in my green house!  That’s the great thing about it all, I can now start to explore using sensors and other devices to get information from the real world and feed it back into the machine.

I’ll post any developments as and when!

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