Every now and then, LeafLabs has the pleasure of participating in outreach activities, giving back and engaging with the broader community. In the past, we’ve sponsored robotics competitions and volunteered at hackathons. This year, we decided to take advantage of MIT’s Independent Activities Period, to teach a class on something we’re passionate about: computer music.

Of all the organs in the human body, perhaps the most difficult to study is the brain, owing to its dazzling complexity and its isolation from the rest of the body afforded by the protective skull and blood-brain barrier. So imagine if a miniature copy of a brain could be grown in a dish from stem cells in the body. With such a technology, the possibilities seem endless for understanding brain diseases and for developing therapeutics quickly.

Maple was mentioned on  Hackaday! Check it out and see what they had to say in their "The $2 32-Bit Arduino (With Debugging)" post. 

How does a computer know which parts it is composed of? What hardware and peripherals are connected? For a desktop computer, many things like storage drives and attached USB devices are discoverable on boot. But for embedded systems, a lot of the hardware is connected via non-discoverable protocols such as SPI, UART, and GPIO. The kernel, which controls the hardware, needs to be told what devices are attached and how to talk to them.