Design and media art education and practice increasingly rely on digital technology. For designers and artists to successfully enter this domain they need to understand the inherent qualities in the media they work with, such as electronics and software. Current prototyping tools for electronics and programming are mostly targeted to engineering, robotics and technical audiences.

The Wiring hardware was carefully designed for this purpose; it is based on the Atmel atmega128 microcontroller, a very powerful device that suits from the simplest tasks to the most challenging requirements and future needs for prototyping interactive artifacts, connectivity and expansion. The Wiring hardware includes access to all these features, diagnostics and provides connectivity to PCs using Windows, Mac OS X or Linux operating systems. The table below shows a comparison between The Wiring hardware features and other prototyping systems.