You probably encountered the term microcontroller before. Nowadays, microcontroller are everywhere and in most devices – starting with your TV remote, over your coffee machine and ending with your laptop.
A microcontroller is a very small computer unit, varying in complexity and capabilities, but almost always able to get an input, do calculations and give an output. They are cheap, powerful and (it's in the name) very small.
There are a variety of consumer microcontroller that we as designers can utilise microcontrollers to give our products and prototypes life. The most common ones, and also the ones we will use in this course, are Arduino and Raspberry Pi. While Arduino is very beginner-friendly and able to do rather basic operations, like letting an LED blink, Raspberry Pi is an actual computer in a small form factor and therefore able to do much more complex operations.