Do you recommend that I make my own gadgets?
ALet’s be realistic. GaGu doesn’t think you’ll be able to create your own iPhone. If the adventures of YouTube channel Strange Parts are anything to go by, even access to Shenzen’s vast multi-floor emporiums of grey market second-hand parts and a desk full of microscopes and reflow solderers doesn’t make this even close to an easy task. But creating your own controllers? Fiddling with electronics to make A Thing? That is something you can absolutely do. It’s something even Guru can do, and his expertise in these matters extends mostly to breaking and ruining.
Guru recently picked up an Arduino kit from Amazon, which is just about flooded with the things. It wasn’t an official Arduino, rather one of the Chinese clones which come in far cheaper – expect to pay around £40 for a big ol’ box with the compatible board itself and a whole host of tinkering components, compared to around £70 for the official equivalent. Following a guide or two reveals that this is basically Lego with 5-volt rails; you plug your components together with teensy little wires poking into a breadboard. Then you just assemble your code by copying and tweaking likely looking chunks or using pre-prepared libraries, and you’re done.
Guru does have some programming experience – the kind which sent his university tutors into early retirement – but he reckons it would be easy enough for even you to understand. Half the time you don’t actually need to understand it. GaGu used a bunch of arcade buttons to build a MIDI controller à la the Midi Fighter 3D (£170) using the alarmingly simple Control Surface library (github.com/tttapa) and about eight lines of code. Just get out there and have a go – as of the end of last year, you can even make Alexa-enabled gadgets.