Day 0 · Prologue
Welcome aboard.
You just watched the situation. The landing computer failed, the ship is sixty metres under the sea, and the oxygen runs out in eight days unless the battery charging system comes back online. Every system on board still works. They just need a new brain. That is you.
Your mission, one day at a time
Over the next thirty days you bring the ship back one system at a time, starting, as Astrid suggests, with the lights. Each day is one short video, one circuit built from the parts in your kit, and a few lines of code that make it work. Do one a day or several in a sitting. The ship will wait.
Before Day 1, three quick things
- Open the kit. Find the HERO Board (the black board with the big square USB socket) and the USB cable. That is all Day 1 needs. Everything else can stay in the box for now.
- Pick how you will program the board. There are two ways and both are fine: the IDE built into this site, which needs nothing installed, or the desktop Arduino IDE, which is the program you will see in the videos. See both options and pick one →
- Say hello to Astrid. The ship's AI is also your tutor. Look for the orange A in the corner of every lesson. Stuck on a wire, an error message, or a word you have not met before? Ask.
Start Day 1: Incoming Broadcast from InventrCorp →
Your crew
Everything else on this site, and when you might want it.
One thing worth knowing: the videos were recorded before the browser IDE existed, so they show the desktop program for sending code to the board. The circuits and the code are the same either way, and we are bringing the videos up to date over the coming months. If what you see on screen does not quite match, the guide in step 2 explains why.