User:Disseminet/Wiring (programming language)

Wiring is an electronics prototyping platform composed of a programming language, an integrated development environment (IDE), and a single-board microcontroller documentation thoughtfully created with designers and artists in mind and community where experts, intermediate and beginners from around the world share ideas, knowledge and their collective experience. It is open-source software. Wiring allows writing software to control devices attached to the electronics board to create all kinds of interactive objects, spaces or physical experiences feeling and responding in the physical world. The idea is to write a few lines of code, connect a few electronic components to the Wiring hardware and observe how a light turns on when person approaches to it, write a few more lines add another sensor and see how this light changes when the illumination level in a room decreases. This process is called sketching with hardware; explore lots of ideas very quickly, select the more interesting ones refine and produce prototypes in an iterative process. The project was initiated in 2003 by Hernando Barragán, formerly from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and currently developed at the School of Architecture and Design at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Wiring builds on Processing, an open project initiated by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, both formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Software
The Wiring IDE is a cross-platform application written in Java which is derived from the IDE made for the programming language Processing. It is designed to introduce programming and sketching with electronics to artists and designers. It includes a code editor with features such as syntax highlighting, brace matching, and automatic indenting that can compile and upload programs to the board with one click.

The Wiring IDE comes with a C/C++ library called Wiring, which makes common input/output operations much easier. Wiring programs are written in C/C++, although users need to define only two functions to make a runnable program:


 * setup – a function run once at the start of a program which can be used to define initial enviroment settings, and
 * loop – a function called repeatedly until the board is powered off.

A typical first program for a microcontroller is to simply blink a light-emitting diode (LED) on and off. In the Wiring environment, the user might write a program like this:

When the user clicks the "Upload to Wiring hardware" button in the IDE, a copy of the code is written to a temporary file with an extra include header at the top and a very simple main function at the bottom, to make it a valid C++ program.

The Wiring IDE uses the GNU toolchain and AVR Libc to compile programs, and uses avrdude to upload programs to the board.

Open hardware and open source
The Wiring hardware reference designs are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and are available on the Wiring Web site. Layout and production files for the Wiring hardware are also available. The source code for the IDE and the hardware library are available and released under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

Processing
Wiring was based on the original work done on the Processing project at MIT.

Arduino and Fritzing
Wiring and Processing have spawned another project, Arduino, which uses the Processing IDE together with a simplified version of the programming language C++ as a way to teach artists and designers how to program microcontrollers. There are now two separate hardware projects, Wiring and Arduino, using the Wiring environment and language. Fritzing is another software environment within this family, which supports designers and artists to document their interactive prototypes and to take the step from physical prototyping to actual product.