The whole Firmata/Johnny-Five thing is weird to me. What happens is the code you write runs in the host computer (not the Arduino) using nodejs and then it uses the Firmata protocol to tell the Arduino to twiddle some digital ports/read some analog ports etc. The Arduino is a complete slave to the host machine and basically acting as an I/O mechanism.<p>To me the joy of microcontrollers is that you write some code that runs in them independently of anything else and then you can make cool stuff with them, such as <a href="http://blog.jgc.org/2012/05/simonoids-its-simon-in-altoids-can.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jgc.org/2012/05/simonoids-its-simon-in-altoids-c...</a><p>In the example in the article, why bother with Arduino? Just get a USB LCD display and talk to it directly.