original
Tinkering With Gadgets
Gadgets one can modify - a lot - are awesome. Not only for educational purposes. I've had some since I was a young boy, back in the age of LEGO and Playmobil as a young company. Electronic gadgets came much later. Well before Arduino and various "Pi" device (Orange, Raspberry, LattePanda and other SBCs). When I was new in University - as a teen - I already built a proper calculator on an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) and months later I began tinkering with Palm PDAs.
I worry about what will happen to Arduino; I've already expressed my reservations in:
- Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
- Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
- Arduino is Now a Patent Bully (Qualcomm)
Qualcomm is notoriously proprietary and overzealous.
We must maintain broad public access to devices anyone can tinker with, or else general-purpose computers will come to an end. Google is already trying to severely restrict what programs we can run on "Linux" (Android) and says it's because of "security" - that is obviously a lie!
Fight for the right to control computers. If you don't, it might be too late to try. █