My software output has dropped off over the last few months. There are a couple of reasons for that: I've had a few private projects to work on for friends, I've been traveling a lot, the winter blues hit me — all kinds of minor things. But a bigger factor is that I've been a little bored with it. The technologies I use most are losing their sheen: PHP isn't glamorous; neither is Perl. I've made some half-hearted stabs at learning Ruby, but I'm a pretty application-oriented guy when it comes to technology (believe it or not) — if a technology doesn't let me do something new and cool, I'm not incredibly interested. Ruby's beautiful, but I'm not ready to spend time on Rails. And as a standalone scripting language, its packages are inferior to Perl. You can do less cool stuff with it (although when you do something you tend to do it in a satisfyingly elegant manner).

The buzzed-about technology platforms have been uninspiring, too. Second Life's brief luster has faded — it looks and performs like crap, there's nothing to do in it but make trouble, and development has to occur in-world, which is frustrating. Twitter's fun and refreshingly simple, but I think other devs have squeezed just about everything out of it that there is to be squozen. I find Facebook to be kind of dumb, and developing for it sounds like no fun at all — a crippled subset of PHP? No thanks.

So I'm stuck waiting for the next big, fun software platform. In the meantime, I've been trying to teach myself about microcontrollers. There's a lot to learn, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass — screwing around with software generally only requires downloading a tarball and firing up a text editor. Working with electronics is harder: debugging is tedious and difficult, and soldering irons take a while to warm up. And although it's a pretty cheap hobby, it's still more expensive than software. I've been doing a lot more reading than wiring.

Still, the potential for making technology interact with the physical world is irresistible, and I've gradually been piecing together the necessary knowledge from the inscrutable materials scattered across the web.

All of which is my way of introducing Spark Fun's tutorials on the subject, which breezily cover the vast majority of things I've taught myself about uCs over the last few months. It sure would've been nice to have this a few months back. If you're interested in the subject, or even just curious what uCs are and can do, give it a read.