LilyPad in the wild

• DOI: 10.1145/1858171.1858206
• Publication Date: 2010-09-14T10:53:20Z
• Authors: Leah Buechley; Benjamin Mako Hill
• Keywords: Arduino; Early adopter; Portrait

This paper examines the distribution, adoption, and evolution of an open-source toolkit we developed called LilyPad Arduino. We track two-year history kit its user community from time was commercially introduced, in October 2007, to November 2009. Using sales data, publicly available project documentation surveys, explore relationship between adopters. investigate developers who has adopted kit---paying special attention gender---explore what people are building with it, describe how feedback impacted development examine why contributing their own LilyPad-inspired tools back community. What emerges is a portrait new technology engineering/design co-evolution.