The next big thing is...

Arduino.

What's Arduino?

It's a *high level* embedded programming framework.

What do we mean by "high level"?

If you've seen James Cameron's "Titanic", then you might not have noticed one of the more interesting things about the vintage giant cruise liner: the manual lever which the Captain uses to control the ship. This ship, arguably the most complex machine ever built at the time, had millions of individual parts. But they were all controllable via this elegant stick which allowed the captain to simply choose "slow, medium, or fast".

We've become accustomed to such abstraction with software. We can simply include a class file, instantiate the class, and often leverage the full power of the technology in only one or two lines of code. But this elegance was missing from hardware design, until fairly recently.

I'm not going to get into the technicals of Arduino. You can use Google for that. But how might it be useful, and why do I say it's the next big thing?

We are all carrying around little devices now. But these devices are often much more powerful (and expensive) than we actually need. In the near future, companies will commission the development of gadgets which do *exactly* what is needed, and nothing more.

Imagine building your own cell phone, your own wi-fi finder. Impossible? Hardly; modern 3D printers and fabricators are already allowing small companies and individuals to manufacture components and chassis.

I'm always amazed by what's coming out of small factories in China these days. These small firms are exporting "fake" iPhones, MP3 players, and more. It's easier than you think, and if we are not careful, we are going to fall behind our global competitors.

Joshua Kitchener specializes in realtime 3D graphics and has been the lead developer of Spaceweather.com for over a decade.