Planet Arduino

Last March, during Arduino Day in Zaragoza, four guys met for the first time and  then decided to participate to the Nasa Challenge collaborating to the project made by Carlos Sicilia Til in the previews months:

OpenCuriosity is an open source, exomars rover (1:5 scale) with Arduino as main controller, based on the NASA Curiosity Rover. It contains a set of Arduino boards and sensors. The general public will be allowed to use these Arduinos and sensors for their own creative purposes while they are in space. All the people will be allowed to integrate their project in the robot, and the data gathered will be available on the internet in order to share this information with the general public for educational, science or other purposes. We want to provide affordable space exploration for everyone!

The robot designed by the Aragonese team is now among the finalists of the NASA contest!

Read the details of the story on El Pais.

Once again this year Arduino will make a donation ( for a total of 30,000 USD) to promote open source culture and innovation.
This year, Arduino is also soliciting suggestions: througout 2014, we are asking our community to highlight the 10 organizations which would best benefit from Arduino support.

Arduino is based on the contribution of many other open source projects and wants to support these and other initiatives sharing our approach and philosophy, through yearly donations.
We thought it could be a great idea to involve the community for selecting the projects to support by suggesting us how they could benefit from Arduino donations.

The Arduino community is invited to suggest beneficiaries – associations, foundations, institutions – according to one or more of the following cornerstones:
- it brings innovations in the open electronic and making ecosystem
- it’s an open source project
- it facilitates the exchange of knowledge
- it has an impact on open source ecosystem
- it is a non commercial project

The first call is open during May: anyone can fill this form to send a suggestion based on the cornerstones explained above by the 30th of May. At the end of June we’ll announce 5 finalists receiving a donation of $2000 each.

The second call for submissions will happen during September.
At Maker Faire Rome in October 2014, Arduino will announce the remaining 5 finalists receiving a donation of $2000 each.

The final selection will be at the discretion of the Arduino team.

Moreover, Arduino founders have already chosen their beneficiaries: Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation and Processing.

Recent declines in honey bee populations raised attention of many scientists and now makers started activating swell.

The Open Source Beehives (OSBH) project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by Bee populations in industrialised nations around the world.
They’ve just launched a campaign on Indiegogo and are waiting for your contribution.

The campaign will help to build new sensors to understand the behaviour of the bees and the pollutants that are killing them. Also the production of the hives relies on the Fab Lab Network, which makes it able to be produced anywhere in the world. The project is proudly powered by the Arduino At Heart Smart Citizen Kit.

Jonathan Minchin, the bee-man in the lab , told us:

The development team is made up of makers, technologists, entomologists and is being led by a wide ranging community of beekeepers. The OSBH team came together in 2013 from the Fab Lab Barcelona, OKNO in Brussels and the Open Tech Collaborative in Denver with the shared objective of designing hives that can support Bee colonies in a sustainable way. To monitor and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops and to engage an active and diverse community to respond to the threats faced by Bees.

Work began to design our Internet-connected beehives and to put them into backyards everywhere. The aim is to grow a citizen-led beehive network that both strengthens bee populations and generates insightful hive data, ultimately we want to help discover what is causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The Smart Citizen platform and (SCK) sensor kit with Arduino at heart provides a perfect fit with the aims of the project in that it allows us to quickly and efficiently develop a powerful and specialised sensor shield adapted for use within a Beehive. The data we produce can also be published openly to the Smart Citizen online platform and shared with the community.

The data from the hives will help beekeepers and scientists monitor the temperature, humidity and relevant sound frequencies coming from within the hives in a non-intrusive way. This data helps them to understand what the colony is doing and how it reacts to environmental changes. We are also working with sensors that can measure the weight of the hive and monitor air born pollutants that might affect the bees. The data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations, allowing for a further comparison and analysis between the hives.

These sensor enhanced hive designs as well as the electronic schematics are being published openly and can be downloaded and made locally at a Fab Labs or any other maker space. The hives along with different options to support the project can be ordered through our current crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

Now watch the video to look at some visual details and meet the other collaborators:

Last year, during World Maker Faire, Massimo Banzi announced the release of the Arduino Community Logo.

It was our effort to support projects, initiatives and activities, blooming within the Arduino community, to express their passionate engagement with us. We designed the logo to allow the personalization of its lower-right part in order to provide a free space to add the name of groups and local communities self-organizing activities and/or online content focused on Arduino.

Now it’s time to give some visibly to those who accepted our invitation and started to use the customised Community Logo in their channels of communication.

Are you using the Arduino Community Logo following the suggestions of this page ?

- If yes, share the link to the page containing the customised logo (blog, Facebook group or page, GooglePlus community or page, etc.) in the comments by the 1st of February (h.23.59 GMT).

- If no, probably your are still using (improperly) the Arduino trademark. But it’s not too late! Read how and why use the Arduino Community Logo. Customise it, upload it and share with us the link in the comments by the 1st of February (h.23.59 GMT).

By the 7th of February  we’ll chose 5 of you from the comments  and reward them with an Arduino Starter Kit !

Ready to share? Go!

Some people call it the “Etsy for hardware”, some other “the indie marketplace for open source hardware”, even if being open is not a requirement. Tindie’s mission consists of connecting the world’s small, hardware businesses with customers all over the world and today starts a cool initiative called Open Designs and Kickbacks. When sellers create a new product, they will be able to select a project the product is a derivative from, and enter the % of sales that will go to the open hardware project.

“Businesses can manufacture the open design as is, or create products derived from it. Those sellers can then kickback a portion of their sales back to the designer. Tindie will handle the disbursement of funds so it’s absolutely painless. For designers, there are no fees, no hosting costs, just a simple way to reap the benefits of their hard work”

Some weeks ago Arduino announced in a blogpost about donating every year to projects which are part of the open source ecosystem because we are grateful to these efforts and want to support them and now we are happy to announce of being Tindie’s first partner in the Open Designs’ initiative.   Businesses that have built on top of Arduino boards can now send a portion of their sales back to Arduino, and help us further growing our efforts in supporting the open source community. Take a look at the products derived from Arduino.

For more info and insights, take a look at the Tindie’s website.

On the 11th of August a team composed by researchers from FabLab Pisa and University of Pisa’s Center for Bioengineering and Robotics “E.Piaggio” will start a great adventure with a Summer School on the project called OS4BME (Open Source for Biomedical Engineering).

The aim of the project is to bring the DIY&Makers approach in the developing of simple, low cost/high impact biomedical devices, precisely, in this particular case, a neonatal Baby Monitor.

The course will take place at Kenyatta University (Nairobi) and it will involve setting up a 3D printing system, developing a neonatal monitoring device, using open source, electronics based on the Arduino platform and powered by solar panels.

Participants will play an active role in the identification of components, design, assembling and testing of the device and in the discussion of regulatory issues in its development. Close attention will also be paid to safety, ergonomic aspects and regulatory  standards for biomedical devices.

The medical device industry in Africa is largely absent and there is an over reliance on foreign companies to repair and design biomedical instrumentation and resolve technical problems … More importantly, at present there are no specific engines or platforms focused on the sharing of biomedical instrumentation and devices. This is because, by their very nature, biomedical devices possess stringent performance requirements to comply with regulatory standards to ensure patient safety.

OS4BME is a project created by Prof. Arti Ahluwalia (Univ. Pisa), Daniele Mazzei and Carmelo De Maria (both from Fablab Pisa but also post-doc researchers at Centro E.Piaggio). The summer school is an initiative organized by a consortium of nine African universities with the objective of creating a sustainable health-care system, developing a network of academic excellence for Biomedical Engineering in Africa with the support of the ‘United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

 Arduino is supporting the project and  we sent to the team a bunch of Arduino UNO boards, Wi-Fi and GSM Shields to be used during the course and then will be donated to the Kenyatta University and Fablab Nairobi.

In the next week  we’ll keep in touch with the team and receive updates directly from the summer school. Stay Tuned on this blog and on the work in progress of their WIKI!

Last week-end we just had a good time at the Maker Faire of Shenzhen, hosted in the wonderful OCT District.

We were invited by Eric Pan from Seeedstudio (thanks Eric for the good time!). The Maker Faire has been a priceless experience to get in touch with the chinese maker community, as well as networking with different Chinese and Chinese-based maker companies creating interesting contents & products.

We finally inaugurated our very first official Weibo account, and shared chinese materials about Arduino. You could come and play with the Esplora as well as code your very own interface, Thanks to our friend Federico Musto and Anna Kao for the help. and Maling and Terry who volunteered for us in the booth giving Arduino goodies and pins to a ton of interested chinese makers and curious. Zack Smith, working now in the HAXLR8R, joined us for some help to test his chinese language. There has been many speeches and presentations (as well as an Arduino workshop held by Guo Haoyun, the chinese translator of Getting Started With Arduino), and all of a sudden I understood I have to learn chinese (!).

The guys of Haxlr8r showed us their cool creations: Haxlr8r is a startup incubator taking cool ideas and startups from around the world and helping them developing and fine tuning their own product (solve all the puzzles in developing a project, 3 to 6 month) for production here in China. They are based closed to the world famous SEG Electronics Market, widely portrayed from Bunnie Wang in this post and from Evil Mad Scientist here.

On Sunday (totally drained out from the previous day) we teamed up with the Trasfabric “Hacked Better” workshop, we visited Chaihuo Makerspace in OCT where Tom Igoe, Zack Hoeken Smith, Gao Lei, Eric Pan (Seeedstudio) talked about maker movement and DIY culture in China, with Silvia Lindtner (ISTC & Fudan University) and Anna Greenspan (NYU Shanghai), organizers of the workshop.

I had the cool opportunity to sit back and listen to many interesting facts and odd metaphors, joining the informal panel. The main idea which came out is looking at the city of Shenzen like the place to be for producing (open) hardware right now, perfectly represented in a cool metaphor of Eric:

Shenzen is the Hollywood of hardware products, where big companies are just like the big Majors: that’s where independent, low-budget movies come out. (movies = products, boards).

Zack and Eric, as well as Tom, talked about the the value of Brand, both as Market Identity and Responsibility. Zack: It looks a bit like a recipe. Hambuger. Everybody makes an hamburger. You can go to McDonald / Burger King or in the finest place. You can make it yourself. What are you hungry for? Basically open sour(c)e hardware can get everybody be the very personal cook of themselves, or at least acknowledges, with different tools and know-hows, the audience (maker movement, kids, any of us).

What are you hungry for?

P.S. please keep an eye on the Transfabric blog to a more comprehensive and less informal sum-up of the workshop, I’m just the one who loves Cinema, Hamburger and Open Source Hardware.

iKazoo  is a prototype for an open source platform using Arduino and  recently launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.  It’s a multifunctional device assistant for entertainment with a  touch and shock sensitive surface. It can easily record or alter your voice but also play many types of instrument.  You can use it as a optical game controller and even as a brush on your pad. The hardware  contains sensors that can monitor all body movements and become a step counter.  Here’s the video presentation:

When I asked them why they chose Arduino, Nasrin Zadeh – the founder of the project -  told me:

We chose Arduino and the Processing platform as we know that there are many creative minds out there who want to program and test  functions  outdoor and on the fly. So in fact, the iKazoo is a mobile Arduino, which interacts with your mobile device, wherever you are. See it as a mobile mini lab. Of course it’s pre-programmed for those who just want to have some fun or personal assistance in sport, fitness wellness our to entertain friends with creative tunes.

iKazoo comes with an App, which contains a look-up table to link audio and sensors to any application of your smart device. So, the user decides what and how to control smart phones, tablets, PC’s, synthesizers or robots. We like the community to support us for the sake of mutual fun experience. Arduino gives the freedom and ease to express and realize creative ideas on the fly.