Hardware: The Arduino Uno

While my initial design was going to just be some logic chips on a breadboard (I envisioned a combination of simple "chase" pattern and always-on which would be easy to plot out with Karnaugh maps), I was soon convinced that I should move past simple logic design and get a programmable chip. This led me to the Arduino Uno, an all-in-one board which comes with a ATmega328 processor, USB input, the ability to be powered by a regular 9V battery, and direct access to the chip's digital I/O ports. The best part is the Arduino IDE, which lets you write programs in a variant of C, rather than machine code.While I can't claim that my code has been completely bug-free, the ability to write in a (relatively) high-level language and then immediately translate this code to an embedded microprocessor is fairly magical, keeping perfectly in line with the technomage theme.