I’ve always been interested in electronics that could control stuff in the real world. Back twenty years ago I used the Commodore 64 to control some motors etc. and had fun with that. It was fairly easy because everything on the serial port was directly available. A peek here and a poke there, and you could do everything! If you had a LED you could wire it up directly into the C64 and turn it on using only two poke commands.
But then the world changed, OS’s became complicated, and the serial port even pretty much disappeared on all computers. USB was the new thing, but USB is seriously complex. Both coding for it, and just to turn on a LED you need a load of electronics at the far end of the USB cable.
Then came the internet, and everything had to be online. All my dreams about controlling stuff sort of boiled down to: “I want it to be online and easy to do.” and thus went nowhere for 20 years… until today where I got my hands on a Nanode board. The only problem was that I hadn’t fiddled with electronics for 20 years! This is how it went…
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