Phssst!
That is the sound of me dusting off this blog.
While it's been a couple of years since I've posted anything here, I've kept tinkering. And I'm hoping to do a whole lot more.
My current buzz is the Arduino culture. I love the open source nature of it. The community of people encouraging each other in Make:, in Instructables, and on Facebook.
I also love that I see women involved in these products: Ladyada from adafruit, Leah Buechler who helped design the Lilypad Arduino sold by Sparkfun, and Cheryl Hrynkiw making videos of Solarbotics products for their website.
It is also nice for me to see Arduino introductions in Craft: magazine, and women shown helping build projects in Make: magazine... which gives me hope that one of these days I will see women writing regularly in Make: or some other geeky hardware magazine.
Still, progress is progress. Mythbusters may not have a lot of women experts to choose from but they do their best to make sure there are women doing interesting technical things on every show... and they're not just writing the documentation.
The freaky/cool think about the Arduino community is that in the early 80's my dad launched a product line from his company that went in exactly this direction. We called them hobby robots and tried to pitch them to teachers for classroom use. Which made me the youngest exhibitor at the First International Personal Robotics Convention. I cut my technical writing teeth writing code for and documenting our Elementary Automation kit, Mobile Mouse, a vision bot, and our 3 axis arm (all available for interfacing with the Commodore 64 and Apple IIe), but by 1990 the line had failed to take off and dad shut it down. I guess now I get to be the hobbyist.
Labels: arduino, engineers, women
posted by Anne @ 10:38 AM
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