Planet Arduino

As familiar as we all are with the UNO, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about the iconic Arduino microcontroller board. Put on your rose-tinted spectacles, and let’s wax poetic about the origins of this beloved maker board.

Rise of the Techno-Hippies

By 2009, the team that would become Arduino was gathering steam. A team that Make: Magazine once referred to as “designers, teachers, artists, and techno-hippies.”

I don’t think anyone on that team would object to such a definition.

Forged in the crucible of a classroom, the idea of an accessible, affordable electronics development platform was under serious investigation. It would eventually give birth to the Arduino UNO, but despite its name meaning “one,” this is far from Arduino’s first board. Moreover, its name was chosen to mark a point in Arduino’s story where the business itself came out of beta and into version 1.0.

“The UNO is an arrival point of a large number of small experimentations and incremental improvements,” says co-founder Massimo Banzi.

These experiments weren’t just a learning experience for electronics design. They were useability tests, and even marketplace research. Each little quirk, unexpectedly popular feature and, of course, mistake helped to define what makers wanted and needed.

This was a time when the maker movement was still unrepresented by a defining brand or killer product. But not for long.

Driving Towards the Future

The journey to the UNO wasn’t short, but it did have a distinct destination. The notion of an enhanced user experience was very prominent, although the people who would become the founders of Arduino hadn’t necessarily articulated it even to themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to see that this guiding principle was there from the beginning.

“On the original Arduino serial board, look at the components,” says co-founder David Cuartielles, talking about the earliest of Arduino’s self-assembly boards, which were used almost exclusively in the classroom. “They’re sorted by value. I made sure that components of a similar type and value were together, to minimize mistakes during assembly. For example, there were two diodes. In terms of operation, they’re working in opposite directions to each other. But to reduce errors when populating the board by hand, I set the diodes facing in the same direction, and the PCB’s tracks take care of orientation. So it’s optimized for education, not for electronic operation!”

“Back in the day we used to use FTDI chips,” Massimo recalls. “A Scottish company, now in Singapore. Great chips, but you had to install drivers to get your computer to recognize devices when you plugged them in.”

“Which is when we realized there was this thing called CDC (communications device class) protocol, which was embedded into operating systems. It’s the reason you don’t need a driver for a USB serial port. We found that you could develop a firmware for some simple Atmel processors that worked just the same as FTDI chips, but would liberate us from needing a driver.”

This opened the door to reprogramming the firmware and making the boards do other things. Some people created MIDI firmware to send notes to a computer. Others made HID firmware so they could emulate computer peripherals. It was the herald of dual processor experimentation, which piqued the interest of both Arduino users and its designers.

Press On with the UNO

These proto-UNOs also required you to press a reset button before uploading new code. It was a pretty standard requirement for any prototyping platform at the time. Most designers had simply never questioned this apparent necessity. But when the Arduino team found themselves placing more and more emphasis on user experience, this small requirement was identified as an obstacle to useability. 

It was at a workshop in Germany when Massimo figured out an alternative.

“It turned out that if you put a capacitor between the reset pin of the microcontroller and one of the serial port pins,” he explains, “it would reset the board automatically whenever you opened the port.” This small tweak became a vital and very popular aspect of the UNO’s useability.

But there were a lot of other factors that went into making the UNO so recognizable that it’s become indistinguishable from the overall Arduino brand.

The Power of One

Early Arduino boards required a more active participation when it came to powering them up.

They already offered flexibility in choosing your power source. But if you wanted to power the board from the USB or the external power jack, you had to move a jumper. Not a lot to ask, but as many of the design experiments proved, these seemingly insignificant requirements had a disproportionate effect on usability.

People would forget to set the jumper in the first place. Or have it in the wrong position when trying to power on, and frustrations ensued. So a small circuit was implemented that detected where the power was coming from, and switched to it automatically. Simple, but essential.

Tweaks to the power options didn’t stop there. On other boards there had been some experimentation with microUSB ports, not realizing how fragile they can be. So when it came to the UNO, the USB connector was carefully chosen for its reliability. “It’s like a Russian tank,” Massimo laughs. “It’s indestructible.”

Feeling Blue

“Going from the original design we had on a rectangular green board, to the shaped blue board that everyone recognizes now, took two days,” David recalls, musing on how Arduino could move so fast because of its focus on simplicity. “And in between we went to a party. Because the designs are very simple.”

 “The original board, before it became the Arduino UNO, was a typical green PCB,” Massimo explains, lavishing mediocrity on the state of pre-Arduino prototyping platforms. “Not so exciting. The PCB manufacturer we were talking to went on and on about how he was making blue PCBs because they were apparently easier on the eye for production line workers. We thought, ‘Hey! Blue is better, because everyone else is using green!’”

You can see a pattern in the way Arduino was beginning to question the norms of its industry. Those shades of blue and teal have become synonymous with Arduino devices, and that didn’t happen by accident. At the time, PCBs were green. Maybe beige, if they were still bare fibreglass. 

But no longer, once the UNO arrived.

Arduino didn’t just have its eye fixed on usability. It was also searching for an identity that makers would associate with enhanced experience and quality. It just so happened that the UNO was destined to become the vessel that gave that identity a tangible shape.

Taking Shape

“I was teaching and I had to draw PCBs on a white board all the time,” recalls David. “And all boards were square or rectangular. So how do you tell people which is left and which is right? In order to avoid errors in plugging things in and building the boards, which originally were self-assembly, I thought it needed to be a non-symmetrical shape. Then the students could see that this is left and this is right. It wasn’t a creative decision, so much as a functional one for education purposes.”

Around that same time, the school where he was teaching in Ivrea was issuing everyone with business cards. They arrived on Massimo’s desk in a small plastic box. “So that seemed like a good starting place for sizing,” Massimo remembers, “as it seemed like a great idea if we could fit the UNO in a plastic box like the one my business cards came in.”

It was taking shape as a very recognizable product. And you want to put your name on  products you’re proud of. Typically any branding on a PCB was added using the standard font that came with the Eagle PCB design software. Essentially vector lines, not graphics. This change was enacted by a former student of the Ivrea classroom, Giorgio Olivero. He was entrusted with the new Arduino identity.

“The strength of our current image depends entirely on the outstanding work Giorgio’s done,” David notes. “Giorgio understands not only graphic design, but the importance of designing the whole user experience. He understood interaction design really well. He understood the nature of the Arduino project intimately, and the needs of the end user.”

The UNO was the moment when quality came home in every respect. The boards were given an appealing new color, precision engineering, high quality manufacturing, and an emblem that made sure you knew you were holding an Arduino.

“The response was fantastic,” David continues, reflecting on the reception that the new Arduino and its flagship device received. “Nowadays it’s really common to do these kinds of things, but back then on the maker scene it was really unusual to put so much into making things look good, and putting a focus on the user experience.”

One Small Mistake

“When I was designing the board I made a mistake that we still have to live with,” admits Massimo. “I moved the connectors in the top right of the board half a step to the left, so the gap between the connectors is non-standard. It’s 1.27mm out. Which is fine on the connectors at the bottom, but that’s why you struggle to use a veroboard to develop shields, because the connectors aren’t quite aligned as they were meant to be.” 

It’s a mistake that had a silver lining, though. That slight misalignment also (inadvertently, perhaps) gave us a key for attaching shields the right way around. So, just between you and me, let’s pretend it was deliberate and say no more about it.

Even the first batch of UNOs that came off the production line weren’t quite where Arduino wanted them to be, quality wise. The process for milling the PCBs into the iconic UNO shape wasn’t as reliable as it is now.

A small number of the boards had rough edges where they were snapped out of the sheet after cutting. Nothing that affected the operation of the board, but not so good when your focus is on achieving a distinctive level of quality.

“A friend and I spent the weekend at the PCB manufacturers,” Massimo remembers, semi-fondly, “sandpapering the edges of the first batch of UNO boards. What else could we do?”

Ten Thousand and UNO

Makers responded very positively to the ethos behind the UNO. And that enthusiasm was directly reflected in the number of Arduino boards sold.

“I remember an article in a magazine celebrating that Arduino had sold 10,000 boards,” Massimo recalls. “Arduino was here to stay, they said, because back then if anyone sold 10,000 boards you were boss!” 

Arduino itself celebrated this milestone back in 2007, with a predecessor to the UNO called the Arduino Diecimila, meaning “ten thousand”. Interestingly enough, this was also the board that introduced automatic software resets when uploading a sketch, so you no longer had to press a reset button. Without the Diecimila, the UNO couldn’t have been born.

Now Arduino’s selling in the region of 10,000 boards a week. As you can imagine, magazines and blogs have stopped writing about every maker device that hits the 10,000 milestone now. The UNO itself, in fact, has recently crossed the 10 million mark.

The Day of the UNO

It wasn’t just the Arduino UNO that was unveiled at the Maker Faire New York in 2010. It was the new Arduino. Colors, branding, logos and a refined focus on usability and recognizable quality across everything Arduino did, from the UNO to the website and the packaging. 

“I was the only one not present at that event in New York,” David laughs. “I was in a hotel in my home town of Malmö, because I had to launch the new website. At the time we were running the whole Arduino server in a $5-per-month VPS, because we had no money. Whenever we announced a new product, the website was going down. So to try and avoid this happening while Massimo was up on stage announcing the Arduino UNO, I was waiting to flip the website to Giorgio’s fantastic new design.”

The UNO’s launch signaled a transition from DIY success story to the primary platform for makers, engineers and creators around the world.

“We didn’t create a computer that allowed people to continue to do their job but at a cheaper price,” David continues. “We created a computer that empowered people who had no idea about electronics to start using technology, and this represented a huge life change for a lot of people. When I hear people say they started with an Arduino UNO, and now they’ve become the IT teacher at their school, it’s just amazing. And there are hundreds of stories like this.”

“There are some products in history that just work,” Massimo concludes. “That simply do what people need. So they endure. They last for a long time.”

He’s talking about the UNO. And its story hasn’t finished yet, as the iconic board was recently re-imagined as the stunningly beautiful UNO Mini Limited Edition.

The post One board to rule them all: History of the Arduino UNO appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Federico Musto, who until two days ago owned the largest part of Arduino AG has been bought out, having today been replaced by a combination of Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante.

This should bring to a close the saga that began with a fork where two companies called themselves “Arduino” and bizarrely continued for almost a year after the reconciliation of the two was announced. What remains today is one corporation called Arduino AG, now captained by Massimo Banzi as Chairman and CTO, and Fabio Violante as CEO.

Massimo Banzi was one of the original founders of Arduino and one side of the trademark litigation during the period in which there were two companies. With the buyout of Musto, Banzi moves back to the top spot. This change in leadership occurred as a company called BCMI bought all shares of Arduino AG. BCMI was started by four of the original Arduino co-founders; you could say the old gang rides again.

Arduino AG is in essence a hardware company, manufacturing and selling the officially branded Arduino boards. But right now they still maintain the official codebase which most people see as belonging to the community. Despite changes at the top, the proof will still be in the pudding. When will we see the Arduino Foundation come to life and take control of the Arduino IDE? Hackaday will continue to look into it and provide updates.

 

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, news

Arduino announced an acquisition today that will merge Arduino.cc and Arduino.org.

Read more on MAKE

The post Acquisition Ushers in New Era for Arduino; Banzi Named Chairman appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

The Arduino Wars officially ended last October, and the new Arduino-manufacturing company was registered in January 2017.  At the time, we were promised an Arduino Foundation that would care for the open-source IDE and code infrastructure in an open and community-serving manner, but we don’t have one yet. Is it conspiracy? Or foul play? Our advice: don’t fret. These things take time.

But on the other hand, the Arduino community wants to know what’s going on, and there’s apparently some real confusion out there about the state of play in Arduino-land, so we interviewed the principals, Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto, and asked them for a progress report.

The short version is that there are still two “Arduinos”: Arduino AG, a for-profit corporation, and the soon-to-be Arduino Foundation, a non-profit in charge of guiding and funding software and IDE development. The former was incorporated in January 2017, and the latter is still in progress but looks likely to incorporate before the summer is over.

Banzi, who is a shareholder of Arduino AG, is going to be the president of the Foundation, and Musto, AG’s CEO, is going to be on the executive board and both principals told us similar visions of incredible transparency and community-driven development. Banzi is, in fact, looking to get a draft version of the Foundation’s charter early, for comment by the community, before it gets chiseled in stone.

It’s far too early to tell just how independent the Foundation is going to be, or should be, of the company that sells the boards under the same name. Setting up the Foundation correctly is extremely important for the future of Arduino, and Banzi said to us in an interview that he wouldn’t take on the job of president unless it is done right. What the Arduino community doesn’t need right now is a Foundation fork.  Instead, they need our help, encouragement, and participation once the Foundation is established. Things look like they’re on track.

A Tale of Two Arduinos

Until late 2014, there were two “Arduinos”: Arduino LLC, which took on the task developing the IDE and guiding the community, and Smart Projects, which was the manufacturing arm of the project that incidentally owned the trademark on the name “Arduino”, at least in Europe. All legal heck broke loose in November 2014, when Smart Projects changed its name to Arduino SRL (an Italian form of limited-liability corporation) and stopped funneling profits back into Arduino LLC. Arduino LLC filed for a trademark in the US, and Arduino SRL countered the filing based on their EU trademark. Arduino LLC filed a lawsuit in the USA, which resulted in two years of uncertainty about which company was the “real” Arduino, confusion in retail channels, two websites, and two versions of the IDE. It wasn’t pretty.

In October 2016, the lawsuit was settled out of court. The settlement documents themselves are under a sort of non-disclosure agreement, and we were told that there are around 500 pages worth. But a very short version is that a new Arduino corporation (Arduino AG) would hold the trademark and rights to produce the boards, while the Arduino Foundation, a 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation would be established to develop the firmware and the IDE.

In a nearly Solomonic decision, Arduino AG is 51% owned by the previous owners of Arduino SRL, and 49% owned by the previous Arduino LLC principals. Federico Musto, the largest shareholder of SRL, is now Arduino AG’s CEO, and Massimo Banzi, the largest shareholder in LLC, is picked to be the Arduino Foundation’s president.

So there are still two “Arduinos”, but their incentives are now aligned instead of adversarial. Arduino AG owns the trademark, manufactures the boards, and makes the money. The Arduino Foundation will be funded by at least Arduino AG, but also by any other stake-holders in the Arduino ecosystem that wish to contribute. Arduino AG is now in a sense just a company that makes development boards, while the Arduino Foundation is in control of the rest of what makes Arduino “Arduino”: the non-tangible environment.

As a result, the community should care a lot about the Foundation. The choices made there will change your programming experience most directly, and if you’re interested in contributing code to the mainline distribution, the Foundation will be the gatekeeper — as much as there can be a gatekeeper in entirely open source software.

Progress, but Slow Progress

So why is setting up the Arduino Foundation taking so long? We’d claim it’s not, and that the signs from both parties indicate that it’s on the right track.

First of all, Musto and Banzi were in an existential fight over control of the ownership of “Arduino” for two of the last two-and-a-half years. As of January 2017, they became part owners of the Arduino AG holding company, but that doesn’t mean they instantly started getting along. It’s no surprise that there’s at least half a year’s worth of trust-building to do between the two.

Add to these personal issues that the Foundation was not the top (legal) priority. Banzi mentioned that, of the 500-page settlement, the Arduino Foundation was one of the last items on the list, and that the settlement wasn’t extremely detailed in that regard to begin with. So there was a lot of work to do, and it was put off until the prioritized stuff was out of the way. We were told that there’s no deadline in the settlement, and in reality, they haven’t been working on the Foundation for more than four months so far. Add in some time for lawyering, and IRS accreditation, and we would forgive them for taking until the end of 2017. Let’s hope it’s sooner.

Finally, both Banzi and Musto are very candid that this is the first Foundation that either of them have ever set up, and that it’s an important one. Nobody wants to get this wrong, and both are looking to other successful open-source Foundations for inspiration and guidance. Both mentioned the Linux and Mozilla foundations as models. This suggests that there’s going to be a mix of developer, user, and manufacturer interests all coming together. And it suggests that the founders are doing their due dilligence instead of just slapping something together.

The Signal, and the Noise

So what can we expect from the Arduino Foundation? Neither Banzi and Musto were able to guarantee anything specific, because they’re still under discussion. Still, there was a reassuring degree of overlap between what Banzi and Musto said. It sounds like they’re getting there.

If you’re interested in the future of the IDE, Banzi’s recent article on the near future is probably a good roadmap, and there’s a lot to like: separating the cross-platform code from the device-specific code (“Project Chainsaw”), and re-thinking the split between the high-level and low-level APIs sounds great to us. Adapting the Arduino pre-processor and toolchain to work with more modern workflows (clang on LLVM) is a huge win. Musto mentioned making the IDE more modular, so that any given part of it could be easily called by external code.

As for the organization itself, it’s likely that there will be an executive board, with half appointed by Musto and half by Banzi, that will run the show. In addition, Musto floated the idea of a few advisory boards, potentially split along lines of hardware manufacturers and firmware developers. He repeatedly said, as he was airing these possibilities, that it was up to Banzi as president to decide in the end. For his part, Banzi declined to speak on any specifics until they’d hammered the details out. In whatever form, we wouldn’t be surprised if representatives from Intel, ST, Nordic Semiconductor, and other chip manufacturers who make Arduino boards have a seat at the table. We’d also like to see the developer community pulled in and given a formal voice somehow.

Both Musto and Banzi seem committed to extreme transparency in the Foundation. Musto mentioned that the Foundation’s financials should be viewable online every month. Banzi is proposing to pre-release the Foundation’s charter. Musto is considering having Arduino AG donate to the Foundation in proportion to Arduino sales, and allowing the purchasers to earmark their portion of the donation toward a specific project as a form of radical democracy. Both Musto and Banzi said the word “open” more times than we could count in the interviews. Given Banzi’s history as an open source hardware pioneer, and Musto’s financial incentives to keep the Arduino train on the tracks, we have little reason to doubt their intentions.

Foundation Fork?

Meanwhile, Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, wrote a piece in which he calls for a “Free Arduino” Foundation, where the Arduino community can jointly determine the future of the little blue boards and their programming environment. Half of the article consists of personal attacks on Federico Musto. Ironically, it was Musto himself who first proposed creating an Arduino Foundation as a neutral party in charge of the IDE, and as a means to funnel money back to the people contributing most to the ecosystem — the developers. Nowhere in the post does Dougherty mention Banzi’s role in the Foundation.

In addition to Dale Dougherty’s post on Make, Phil Torrone of Adafruit made a few posts last week that suggested, vaguely or otherwise, that the future of the IDE was being “steered off a cliff” or otherwise hijacked by the Foundation because of Musto’s participation. He interpreted Dougherty’s post as calling for a grassroots, developer-based Arduino Foundation.

We asked both Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto what they thought about the call for a Foundation fork. Neither of them had talked to Dougherty or Adafruit about the Foundation, and both felt blindsided by their accusations. Banzi was quite dismissive of the “Arduino is no longer open source” argument, stating that once code is out there with an open license, it can’t be taken back. If Arduino steers off a cliff, just roll back a few versions and fork. Banzi felt like the argument was insulting the last decade of his, along with the other early founders’, work. He would not comment on Dougherty’s article, saying instead that he’ll talk with him later.

The elephant in the room is Musto’s alleged fabrication of his previous academic credentials, which he has since retracted. It certainly does raise the question of whether he is trustworthy. But with Banzi still involved and slated to take the helm of the Foundation we see more reasons for hope in the future than not, or at least a reason to wait and see.

Is the Arduino Foundation run by insiders? Of course it is. Who other than Massimo Banzi would you appoint to run it? And you have to give the Arduino AG CEO a seat on the board, not the least because they own the trademark and the software needs to run on their hardware. Banzi and Musto display every sign of wanting to get it right: keeping it open, transparent, and responsive to both the community and industry.

Arduino’s code acceptance over the last twelve years hasn’t always been exactly transparent either, and many parts of the IDE could use a fresh coat of paint. It’s easy to idealize the past, but looking to the future, a Foundation which brings numerous and diverse stakeholders to the table can help refresh stale perspectives. Banzi’s roadmap for the IDE is solid. With some more good ideas, and money to back them up, the Foundation could be the best thing that’s ever happened to Arduino.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, Current Events, Featured, news

The Arduino Wars officially ended last October, and the new Arduino-manufacturing company was registered in January 2017.  At the time, we were promised an Arduino Foundation that would care for the open-source IDE and code infrastructure in an open and community-serving manner, but we don’t have one yet. Is it conspiracy? Or foul play? Our advice: don’t fret. These things take time.

But on the other hand, the Arduino community wants to know what’s going on, and there’s apparently some real confusion out there about the state of play in Arduino-land, so we interviewed the principals, Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto, and asked them for a progress report.

The short version is that there are still two “Arduinos”: Arduino AG, a for-profit corporation, and the soon-to-be Arduino Foundation, a non-profit in charge of guiding and funding software and IDE development. The former was incorporated in January 2017, and the latter is still in progress but looks likely to incorporate before the summer is over.

Banzi, who is a shareholder of Arduino AG, is going to be the president of the Foundation, and Musto, AG’s CEO, is going to be on the executive board and both principals told us similar visions of incredible transparency and community-driven development. Banzi is, in fact, looking to get a draft version of the Foundation’s charter early, for comment by the community, before it gets chiseled in stone.

It’s far too early to tell just how independent the Foundation is going to be, or should be, of the company that sells the boards under the same name. Setting up the Foundation correctly is extremely important for the future of Arduino, and Banzi said to us in an interview that he wouldn’t take on the job of president unless it is done right. What the Arduino community doesn’t need right now is a Foundation fork.  Instead, they need our help, encouragement, and participation once the Foundation is established. Things look like they’re on track.

A Tale of Two Arduinos

Until late 2014, there were two “Arduinos”: Arduino LLC, which took on the task developing the IDE and guiding the community, and Smart Projects, which was the manufacturing arm of the project that incidentally owned the trademark on the name “Arduino”, at least in Europe. All legal heck broke loose in November 2014, when Smart Projects changed its name to Arduino SRL (an Italian form of limited-liability corporation) and stopped funneling profits back into Arduino LLC. Arduino LLC filed for a trademark in the US, and Arduino SRL countered the filing based on their EU trademark. Arduino LLC filed a lawsuit in the USA, which resulted in two years of uncertainty about which company was the “real” Arduino, confusion in retail channels, two websites, and two versions of the IDE. It wasn’t pretty.

In October 2016, the lawsuit was settled out of court. The settlement documents themselves are under a sort of non-disclosure agreement, and we were told that there are around 500 pages worth. But a very short version is that a new Arduino corporation (Arduino AG) would hold the trademark and rights to produce the boards, while the Arduino Foundation, a 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation would be established to develop the firmware and the IDE.

In a nearly Solomonic decision, Arduino AG is 51% owned by the previous owners of Arduino SRL, and 49% owned by the previous Arduino LLC principals. Federico Musto, the largest shareholder of SRL, is now Arduino AG’s CEO, and Massimo Banzi, the largest shareholder in LLC, is picked to be the Arduino Foundation’s president.

So there are still two “Arduinos”, but their incentives are now aligned instead of adversarial. Arduino AG owns the trademark, manufactures the boards, and makes the money. The Arduino Foundation will be funded by at least Arduino AG, but also by any other stake-holders in the Arduino ecosystem that wish to contribute. Arduino AG is now in a sense just a company that makes development boards, while the Arduino Foundation is in control of the rest of what makes Arduino “Arduino”: the non-tangible environment.

As a result, the community should care a lot about the Foundation. The choices made there will change your programming experience most directly, and if you’re interested in contributing code to the mainline distribution, the Foundation will be the gatekeeper — as much as there can be a gatekeeper in entirely open source software.

Progress, but Slow Progress

So why is setting up the Arduino Foundation taking so long? We’d claim it’s not, and that the signs from both parties indicate that it’s on the right track.

First of all, Musto and Banzi were in an existential fight over control of the ownership of “Arduino” for two of the last two-and-a-half years. As of January 2017, they became part owners of the Arduino AG holding company, but that doesn’t mean they instantly started getting along. It’s no surprise that there’s at least half a year’s worth of trust-building to do between the two.

Add to these personal issues that the Foundation was not the top (legal) priority. Banzi mentioned that, of the 500-page settlement, the Arduino Foundation was one of the last items on the list, and that the settlement wasn’t extremely detailed in that regard to begin with. So there was a lot of work to do, and it was put off until the prioritized stuff was out of the way. We were told that there’s no deadline in the settlement, and in reality, they haven’t been working on the Foundation for more than four months so far. Add in some time for lawyering, and IRS accreditation, and we would forgive them for taking until the end of 2017. Let’s hope it’s sooner.

Finally, both Banzi and Musto are very candid that this is the first Foundation that either of them have ever set up, and that it’s an important one. Nobody wants to get this wrong, and both are looking to other successful open-source Foundations for inspiration and guidance. Both mentioned the Linux and Mozilla foundations as models. This suggests that there’s going to be a mix of developer, user, and manufacturer interests all coming together. And it suggests that the founders are doing their due dilligence instead of just slapping something together.

The Signal, and the Noise

So what can we expect from the Arduino Foundation? Neither Banzi and Musto were able to guarantee anything specific, because they’re still under discussion. Still, there was a reassuring degree of overlap between what Banzi and Musto said. It sounds like they’re getting there.

If you’re interested in the future of the IDE, Banzi’s recent article on the near future is probably a good roadmap, and there’s a lot to like: separating the cross-platform code from the device-specific code (“Project Chainsaw”), and re-thinking the split between the high-level and low-level APIs sounds great to us. Adapting the Arduino pre-processor and toolchain to work with more modern workflows (clang on LLVM) is a huge win. Musto mentioned making the IDE more modular, so that any given part of it could be easily called by external code.

As for the organization itself, it’s likely that there will be an executive board, with half appointed by Musto and half by Banzi, that will run the show. In addition, Musto floated the idea of a few advisory boards, potentially split along lines of hardware manufacturers and firmware developers. He repeatedly said, as he was airing these possibilities, that it was up to Banzi as president to decide in the end. For his part, Banzi declined to speak on any specifics until they’d hammered the details out. In whatever form, we wouldn’t be surprised if representatives from Intel, ST, Nordic Semiconductor, and other chip manufacturers who make Arduino boards have a seat at the table. We’d also like to see the developer community pulled in and given a formal voice somehow.

Both Musto and Banzi seem committed to extreme transparency in the Foundation. Musto mentioned that the Foundation’s financials should be viewable online every month. Banzi is proposing to pre-release the Foundation’s charter. Musto is considering having Arduino AG donate to the Foundation in proportion to Arduino sales, and allowing the purchasers to earmark their portion of the donation toward a specific project as a form of radical democracy. Both Musto and Banzi said the word “open” more times than we could count in the interviews. Given Banzi’s history as an open source hardware pioneer, and Musto’s financial incentives to keep the Arduino train on the tracks, we have little reason to doubt their intentions.

Foundation Fork?

Meanwhile, Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, wrote a piece in which he calls for a “Free Arduino” Foundation, where the Arduino community can jointly determine the future of the little blue boards and their programming environment. Half of the article consists of personal attacks on Federico Musto. Ironically, it was Musto himself who first proposed creating an Arduino Foundation as a neutral party in charge of the IDE, and as a means to funnel money back to the people contributing most to the ecosystem — the developers. Nowhere in the post does Dougherty mention Banzi’s role in the Foundation.

In addition to Dale Dougherty’s post on Make, Phil Torrone of Adafruit made a few posts last week that suggested, vaguely or otherwise, that the future of the IDE was being “steered off a cliff” or otherwise hijacked by the Foundation because of Musto’s participation. He interpreted Dougherty’s post as calling for a grassroots, developer-based Arduino Foundation.

We asked both Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto what they thought about the call for a Foundation fork. Neither of them had talked to Dougherty or Adafruit about the Foundation, and both felt blindsided by their accusations. Banzi was quite dismissive of the “Arduino is no longer open source” argument, stating that once code is out there with an open license, it can’t be taken back. If Arduino steers off a cliff, just roll back a few versions and fork. Banzi felt like the argument was insulting the last decade of his, along with the other early founders’, work. He would not comment on Dougherty’s article, saying instead that he’ll talk with him later.

The elephant in the room is Musto’s alleged fabrication of his previous academic credentials, which he has since retracted. It certainly does raise the question of whether he is trustworthy. But with Banzi still involved and slated to take the helm of the Foundation we see more reasons for hope in the future than not, or at least a reason to wait and see.

Is the Arduino Foundation run by insiders? Of course it is. Who other than Massimo Banzi would you appoint to run it? And you have to give the Arduino AG CEO a seat on the board, not the least because they own the trademark and the software needs to run on their hardware. Banzi and Musto display every sign of wanting to get it right: keeping it open, transparent, and responsive to both the community and industry.

Arduino’s code acceptance over the last twelve years hasn’t always been exactly transparent either, and many parts of the IDE could use a fresh coat of paint. It’s easy to idealize the past, but looking to the future, a Foundation which brings numerous and diverse stakeholders to the table can help refresh stale perspectives. Banzi’s roadmap for the IDE is solid. With some more good ideas, and money to back them up, the Foundation could be the best thing that’s ever happened to Arduino.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, Current Events, Featured, news

The Arduino team and Arduino Holding need to show us that the Arduino Foundation has been formed as an independent and open organization.

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The post Free Arduino appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Arduino.cc and Arduino.org have signed a settlement agreement that reconnects the two divisions into one group.

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The post Arduino.cc and Arduino.org Reconcile with Settlement Agreement, Become One Company appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi and Maker Media’s Dale Dougherty will be in Brussels next week to help kick off European Maker Week at the Opening Conference. During their keynote, they will address European citizens in hopes of inspiring Makers to build projects throughout the weeklong celebration taking place all over the continent. Those wishing to learn more can do so by checking out the agenda and booking their free ticket for Monday, May 30th at the European Committee of the Regions.

 

European Maker Week is the first initiative promoted by European Commission and implemented by Maker Faire Rome, in collaboration with Startup Europe, to raise awareness around the significance of the Maker culture and its ecosystem, as well as foster creativity and innovation in schools.

Europe is not only home to the highest number of fab labs, Makerspaces, and hackerspaces in the world, it’s also the birthplace of disruptive projects like Arduino, Raspberry Pi,  micro:bit, and RepRap. Every year, there are over 50 Maker Faires, Mini Maker Faires, and the flagship Maker Faire Rome, which drew attention from 100,000-plus visitors in 2015.

European Maker Week, which will be held May 30th to June 5th, will play host to more than 450 events across 28 countries. Click on the map below to find the the event nearest you:

More than 10 years ago, we set out to simplify electronics with easy-to-use, open-source hardware. 10 years later, we’re looking to do the same for Internet of Things development with Arduino Create — an integrated online platform that enables Makers to write code, access content, configure boards, and share projects.

Traditionally speaking, going from an idea to a fully-functional IoT device has been a tedious process even for the most advanced engineers and developers. Until now, they would have to frequently switch back and forth between various tools and screens, from IDEs to cloud services. That’s why Arduino has set out to launch a one stop shop for the Maker experience, which will change the way you create, collaborate and communicate with your projects and the rapidly growing community.

Whereas many companies deliver IDEs, some offer clouds and others curate DIY projects, Arduino Create converges all of that under one roof for an entirely fragmented-free user experience. Designed to provide Makers with a continuous workflow, the new platform connects the dots between every part of a Maker’s journey from inspiration to installation. Ideally, you will now have the ability to manage every aspect of your project right from a single dashboard.

With Arduino Create, you can tap into the power of the community on the Arduino Project Hub by browsing a collection of projects and then making them your own. You can share your creations, along with step-by-step guides, schematics, references, and receive feedback from others.

Despite your skill level, Arduino Create features in-depth guided flows to help easily configure online services like the Web Editor and Cloud. There’ll even be an additional learning component via Arduino’s popular Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) educational program in the near future that will spark collaboration between teachers and their students.

The Arduino Web Editor allows you to write code and upload sketches to any Arduino or Genuino board after installing a simple plug-in — your Sketchbook will be stored in the cloud and accessible from any device. You can even import your Sketchbook via a .zip file! What’s more, sharing a sketch is now as easy as sharing a link.

 

 

For Maker Faire Bay Area we are bumping up the number of beta testers for the Arduino Web Editor: the most active contributors will receive 10 invites each! If you’d like to contribute to the development as well, you can sign up on the waiting list to join more than a thousand testers.

It should also be noted that Arduino has partnered with Amazon Web Services to power the new Arduino Create ecosystem. “By adopting AWS IoT and AWS Lambda for our IoT Cloud infrastructure, we provide Arduino Cloud and Arduino Web Editor users with a secure, reliable, and highly scalable environment that will enable Makers to connect their projects to the Internet and manage them through the Cloud,” says Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi.

Interested in learning more? Maker Faire goers can hear all about it from Massimo himself on Saturday, May 21 at 12:30pm in his annual “State of Arduino” address.

Back at Arduino Day 2016, Massimo Banzi explored the true meaning of the Internet of Things in a more philosophical, approachable way. During his presentation, the Arduino co-founder touched upon the current state of the industry, some guiding principles, as well as what the future may entail.

“A lot of people are trying to build products that are connected, but not a lot of stuff makes a lot of sense right now. There’s a lot of strange stuff happening. It’s the beginning of an industry,” Banzi explained. “There’s a couple of misconceptions. A lot of people tend to equate the Internet of Things with smart thermostats for your home, and it’s much more than that. The part of the IoT that right now is impacting and can impact your life the most is the least sexy one.”

You can watch the entire talk below: