I got an Arduino for Fathers’ Day from my son, and an Arduino Cookbook from my wife.

The Maker Movement just went personal for me.

In case you don’t know what the Maker Movement is, it’s a bottom-up movement of hardware tinkerers, largely hobbyists today, which I believe will revolutionize manufacturing and basically end the Industrial Revolution (or cause a new one, depending on how you look at it).

In case you don’t know what an Arduino is, it’s a popular open-source hardware module with a programmable controller and some I/O junk that sells for ~$20 and is pretty easy to program.

(That’s pretty easy for me to see; I haven’t programmed it yet.  Catch up with me a few weeks and see how easy I think it is.)

First application?  My son suggested I make a gizmo to automatically power-cycle my cable modem.  Not a bad idea, although my ISP says you should disconnect the coax cable as part of the process, which means some way to interrupt the coax.

First step in any project of this source: scour what my son calls “the InterTubes” for prior art.  I’ll start on that this week.

Very cool stuff, at least for me.