| 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.

|  | Wiring hardware | BasicX | BasicStamp | PIC 16F876 | atmega8 / atmega168 (Arduino)
| I/O Pins | 53 | 16 | 15 | 22 | 11
| Memory | 128K | 32K | 2K | 14K | 8K / 16K
| Analog Inputs | 8 | 8 | No | No | 6
| External Interrupts | 8 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 2
| Hardware Serial Ports | 2 hardware serial ports, One (Serial1) available on Wiring pins 2(Rx) and 3 (Tx) the other (Serial) is available through the USB connector on the board | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 Available through the USB port on the Board
| USB | Yes, Included on the Wiring I/O board | No, it requires an extra adapter | No, it requires an extra adapter | No, it requires an extra adapter | Yes, Included on the board
| Power | External 7-12V generic adapter or through the USB when connected to a computer | Requires power regulator circuit + adapter | Requires power regulator circuit + adapter | Requires power regulator circuit + adapter | External 7-12V generic adapter or through the USB when connected to a computer
| PWM (Analog Outputs) | 6 PWM Channels (analog outputs) | No | No | 2 | 3
| Programming language | Wiring | Basic | Basic | Basic | Wiring
| OS Supported | Windows, MacOSX, Linux | Windows, MacOSX | Windows | Windows | Windows, MacOSX, Linux