A lot of physical computing set-ups work with an Atmel AVR Atmega chip, on which you flash – compile a little programme to interact with the physical reality and sensors. The most popular chips are the Atmel Atmega 168 – or 328. They are at theart of a microcontroller such as Arduino. But the chips themselves can be programmed and used as well. This is at a deeper level than programming Sketches onto your microcontroller!

In this Hackaday post the first step towards programming such a chip are set up.
In this Sparkfun tutorial they show you how to programme such a chip through Arduino.

If all goes as planned, we will try this at the next workshop! There is still time to register.