Open the sauce

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there. 

Bill Gates

As part of our plan to automate some stuff around the new house (including eventually the greenhouse and irrigation), I'm relearning programming microprocessors (or to be more correct microcontrollers).

After years of mucking around with the Raspberry Pi, including using it to teach coding at various schools, I've moved to the Arduino platform where both the coding and the control interface is a little more intense, but perfect for the job/s at hand.

In the following video you'll see a very simple LED pulsing program designed online, and then downloaded, compiled and uploaded to an Arduino-clone connected to a breadboard.  Small steps I'm sure you will agree, but pretty neat and all open source.

I've been on the open source bandwagon for nearly 20 years, and to this day don't understand why people are still using Micro$oft for their OS and pay for crappy software when there is so much free, stable and productive software out there.  Are we an innovative bunch Mr Turnbull?  Perhaps still a little risk-averse...

P.S. Sorry for the raspy voice, as always when school holidays hit my immune system relaxes and then gets smashed!