When I reflected on the results of 430man I liked the outcome. It was much easier for me to explain “chips” and get people excited about electronics. I think it lowered the entry barrier and serves as a conversation starter.

But the engineer in me was not too happy. The 430man is build of 16 bit Ultra-Low-Power MCU’s, RAM, Flash, 12 MHz clock,… All sitting idle. So why not make it interactive? Touch it and it blinks. A couple of LED’s, CR2032 and 38 lines of code later the evolution was complete.

Now pointing at these two sculptures is easy, explaining that they are made of MicroControllers, very smart things that can detect that they are touched and react to it by turning on all this fancy lights.

And if the audience is still awake the story can be continued by talking about build details – Read on!