There’s a great deal to reflect upon from this past semester, but I think I’ll start by looking forward.

For the last two years, I have been delving deeper into the world of embedded systems. By this, I mean computational devices that exist in the world around us. Your microwave is an example. Mobile phones. The LEGO Mindstorms. Cars. Toys. Gadgets.

All of these things have little computers in them, and they all interact with the world in one or more ways. Sometimes they have buttons, sometimes displays, sometimes a multitude of sensors, or perhaps various kinds of radios for doing wireless communications: WiFi, or Bluetooth, or GSM (which is what many mobile phones use). I’ve learned how to program these devices, and have been thinking hard about how to make programming them easier and more robust.

But what I don’t have is good mastery over how you design and build these little devices. I can program them, but I can’t create them. It is all fine and good that I can write programs on my laptop that do interesting things with all kinds of data, whether that data lives on my hard drive and from the Internet-at-large. But when it comes to embedded systems, I feel like there is a great deal of power to be had from being able to combine the components—the processors, the radios, and the sensors—to create devices of my own design.

This semester, a group of five Olin students have agreed to help me tackle this learning challenge. Together, we’re going to explore the basics of digital design, and build a small device that is capable of doing something interesting. Ideally, I’d like it if the device was human powered—perhaps by a clockwork spring or similar. But to start, we’ll see what we can do in terms of reading documentation, drawing schematics, and assembling our own, tiny computational device that can interact with the world around it.