Electronics hobbyists have enjoyed making their own projects for decades. Digital logic chips sparked the first revolution of rich functionality, and now the next stage is upon us: including a device capable of running software into the midst of an electronic circuit.

These devices tend to get called microcontrollers (rather than microprocessors) to reflect the fact that they're often lower powered and less capable than the chips that run our desktop computers. There's also an element in that it's the microcontroller in charge – it's in control of the hardware around it.

The great thing about microcontrollers is that the emphasis has shifted from having lots of hardware, to having a chip that can do just about anything by changing its software.  It's endlessly tweakable.

The other wave that we're catching right now is the emphasis on participation in the process of making things.  It’s not enough to buy a product off the shelf any more.  I want to be able to buy it, and then change it if it doesn't suit my needs.  Or make it do something the original creators had not even thought of.  This culture of making, creating, building, changing and hacking has given us new hobbies and new opportunities to express the creative spirit that we all share.

So combining these two things, we have a new adventure in embedded electronics, something that if you’re reading this web site, we're sure you share.

At Embedded Adventures we hope to be able to start you off on this endeavour – even if you've never written any software for a microcontroller before - and provide you with tools, platforms and ideas to keep your adventure going. We provide hardware platforms to build on, fun devices to display information or find out about the world around you, things to help connect it all together and best of all plenty of free software to make the learning curve more like a ramble up the hillside.

We hope you have a fantastic embedded adventure and tell us about the challenges, successes and projects you make along the way.