Planet Arduino

Our good friends over at Primo Toys have just launched their brand new Cubetto Playset and joined Arduino AtHeart program! Cubetto is a playful wooden robot that helps young children (3-6) discover programming through storytelling, adventure and collaboration. It’s the first coding toy of its kind to work without a screen or digital interface, and lets children learn to code before they can read or write. Cubetto is for boys and girls of any language anywhere in the world. It has been designed to help create a new, universal standard in tangible coding that will help will drive today’s coding revolution from the ground up.

The Cubetto Playset is exclusively available on Kickstarter for the discounted price of $149 until April 6th:

Part of the Arduino At Heart program, Cubetto provides gender-neutral play that boosts a child’s creativity, critical thinking, spatial awareness and communication skills. A beta version of the product, which raised over $80,000 (nearly £57,000) on Kickstarter in 2013, is used by more than 300 schools and 500 families in over 40 countries worldwide. Following years of testing and numerous iterations, Cubetto now boasts a learning platform that expands and connects to a limitless number of devices via Bluetooth.

Check the video to see it in action!

It’s cute, it’s fun and easy to assemble, it’s mBot by Makebloc, the new educational robot joining Arduino AtHeart program!

mBot it’s an all-in-one solution for kids and beginners to enjoy the hands-on experience about robotics, programming, and electronics.

You can program it with drag-and-drop graphical programming software based on Scratch 2.0 and the magic happens: the robots can follow lines, kick balls and push objects, avoid walls and more. You can also switch from graphical to text-based programming in Arduino mode as it can be coded with Arduino IDE environment.

Watch the video of their successful Kickstarter campaign:

mBot supports wireless communication, standard Arduino boards like Arduino Uno, Leonardo boards, Arduino Nano, Arduino Mega 2560, Makeblock mCore (based on Arduino Uno).

The main control board’s design, mCore of mBot, is based on Arduino UNO: with intuitional color labels and easy-to-use RJ25 connectors, the board can get wired easily so students can then get more time to focus on creating all kinds of interactive stories and projects.

To help teachers, parents, and kids get started easier and faster the robot kit has two free tutorial e-books and online manuals are provided and increasing continually.

Take a look at mBot on Makeblock website and discover how to use 2.4GHz wireless module and Bluetooth module with mBot:

Massimo Banzi with Makeblock team

Finding the perfect gift for everyone on your list it’s fun and inspiring. Let us help you choose the perfect gift: next to our classic Arduino, Genuino boards and goodies, we created 3 thematic guides to highlight the products in our stores that deserve a spot on your gift list. And to make it even more special, we added a FREE SHIPPING* feature for orders over 150$/100€.

TINKERING
Experience the magic of playing with technology. Your creative confidence is going to boost!

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to Tinkering

• Many people around the world had fun tinkering on the 15 projects featured in the Arduino Starter Kit and Genuino Starter Kit. Now you can make someone happy too for XMas! The Starter Kit is available in English and Italian.

• The 3rd edition of Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh introduces to the UNO board, gives you lots of ideas for projects, and helps you experiment with them right away.

• If you are looking for interacting with your surroundings in experimental ways, Arduino AtHeart Bare Conductive Touch Board and Touch Board Kit can turn almost any material or surface into a sensor. Connect objects to its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or any conductive material and create amazing musical instruments.

KIDS
Get inspired and make this holiday special for your kids! Get them to experiment with science and technology and the wonderful world of STEAM.

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to kids

• You can share your excitement with electronics playing with kids and teenagers on the TV-B-Gone Kit, a universal remote designed to shut off any TV. It’s fun making it and using it.

• Get started with paper circuits and stickers with Chibit Circuit Sticker Start Kit an imaginative and easy way to make fun electronics projects without coding, soldering, or hands-on experience.

• Play with the most hackable tiny synth ever! NS1nanosynth synthesizer is an handeld 220x85mm analog modular synthesizer coupled with an Arduino Leonardo platform. it’s a tool to explore the potential contamination between analog and digital music creation!

IOT & CONNECTIVITY
Create connected devices and master your IoT skills. It’s easier than you think.

Click and explore the product of the gift guide dedicated to IoT

•  Blend Micro is a RedBearLab Arduino AtHeart integrated development board. They “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a small single board. You can quickly and easily develop low power IoT projects.

• Making things Talk 2nd edition by Arduino co-founder Tom Igoe, shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest.In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands

On our stores we are offering FREE SHIPPING for all orders over 150$ (below 3 Lb) in USA via USPS Priority Mail, and for all orders over 100€ (below 3 Kg) via GLS in Europe.

Delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by December 24th, we strongly advise you to place the order before December 18th.

Free Shipping is available from November 27th 2015 until January 6th 2016.

Industruino’s mission is to offer industrial automation components that have the simplicity of Arduino at its core. It’s created by Loic & Ainura, two product designers originally from Belgium and now based in Shenzhen, with a mission to help people make their own products, by creating an accessible platform.

Today they are officially joining the Arduino AtHeart program with Industruino Proto, a Leonardo compatible industrial controller housed in a DIN-rail enclosure, with screw connector terminals to robustly connect to sensors and actuators.

Industruino allows makers and professionals to take a breadboarded solution and make it into an enclosed finished looking product, ready for permanent installation. Watch Loics’ introduction:

With Industruino everyone can combine the strengths of Arduino with the specific requirements of industry:

We are now at the dawn of a new industrial revolution, one in which the key elements will be automation, robotics and interconnected devices. In this revolution the Arduino platform is growing to be a real contender.

We are very excited to become part of the At Heart family! It is our way to show that we are very much interlinked with the Arduino community. We are looking forward to further develop the use of Arduino in industrial applications whilst contributing back to the Arduino platform.

When you open the enclosure you will find a prototyping area to add your own components, and re-routable jumper connections, letting you connect any point to either the microcontroller’s pins or the external screw connectors. The onboard graphic LCD and membrane button panel facilitate quick UI development to visualise and input your application’s data.

Explore other tech info on Industruino website and make it yours on their store!

After two and a half years of work and dozens of prototypes, Kaia Dekker and Jesse Vincent have launched Keyboardio Model 01 on Kickstarter: an heirloom-grade mechanical keyboard designed for serious typists.

As you’ll see from the video presentation below, the Model 01 is not just a keyboard. Kaia and Jesse actually re-envisioned the way we type to make it feel great. On top of that it has a beautiful hardwood enclosure and it ships with source code and a screwdriver. The Model 01’s firmware is a regular Arduino sketch you can explore and change yourself.

The project reached its target in the first few hours and you have a few more days to get one!

In the meantime they also joined the Arduino at Heart Program to make it fully customizable with the Arduino IDE:

We’ve built the Model 01 around the same ATmega32U4 microcontroller that Arduino uses in the Arduino Leonardo. Early on, we figured we’d eventually switch away to a cheaper ARM microcontroller, but then we fell in love with just how easy Arduino makes it for a new programmer to get up to speed. For all intents and purposes, the Model 01’s brain is a regular Arduino. You can update your keyboard from the Arduino IDE. If you want to make your keyboard do something special, there are thousands of Arduino resources online to help you out.

 

Learn more about Keyboardio on Kickstarter, where you can pre-order it and support Jesse & Kaia, who made it with love (and just a bit of obsession).

We are happy to announce Tsunami by Arachnid Labs has joined the Arduino At Heart Program.

Tsunami is a new powerful and flexible signal generator built on the Arduino platform and the best way to get started experimenting with analog signals.

Nick Johnson, its creator, took the versatile processor behind the Arduino Leonardo, and combined it with a Direct Digital Synthesis chip, which makes generating analog signals incredibly straightforward. He also added flexible input and output circuitry, an easy to use software library, to make working with analog signals as easy as blinking an LED.

Tsunami lowers the barriers to making music, sending and receiving data, experimenting amateur radio, and creating educational applications. It was launched successfully on KickStarter last April and you are in time to pre-order it on Crowd Supply!

Here’s a list of projects you could do:

•  Use it as a building block for a synthesizer
• Measure unknown signals
• Measure the response curve of your audio amplifier
• Implement an APRS modem
• Generate precise clocks for other devices
• Make a digital theremin
• Read and write data tapes from classic computers (Commodore, Atari, etc)
• Test filters and reactive components (capacitors, inductors, and so forth)
• Encode and decode your own data for audio transmission
• Teach yourself about Direct Digital Synthesis
• Teach yourself about AC and complex impedance
• Make your own low frequency radio transmitter

Want to know more? Meet Nick and Tsunami in this video:

InternTrip is a board game prototyped by 2nd year Masters students at the École de Communication Visuelle Aquitaine (France) and running on Arduino at Heart Blend Micro.

Once again designers Guillaume Beinat and Alexandre Suné of Tazas Project directed a dozen students* into creating an  immersive game focusing on the experience of internship in a communication agency:

 The system they use relies on the use of an Arduino bluetooth card which calculates the player’s position on the board and simultaneously transmits this information to the smartphone. The coordinates received allow the player to discover the inside of the agency by moving their smartphone over the outer wall of the building, or in other words, the board. From table football to the terrasse, passing by the coffee machine or the photocopier, they invite us to visit the agency, to talk with the team and to compete with our colleagues in head to head questionnaires about the world of advertising. This is your time,  young,  exploited interns, to take your revenge and land that job!

* Manon Fauvel, Anna Borup, Benjamin Armel, Charlotte du Portal, Émilien Badoc, Guilhem Pacha, Isabelle Ducournau, Nicolas Pierre, Sandy Kauy, Sophie Cazes, Arnaud Bresson

Newtc is our latest partner joining the Arduino At Heart program with three new products of the same family.

The Prototyping Board by Newtc is an Arduino At Heart coming in a couple of versions: the DIY version you can assemble and solder yourself and the Assembled version ready to be used. The CPU of the boards ( ATMEGA328P-PU ) is already burned with Arduino Uno bootloader. In addition to the boards, Newtc provides also the Arduino At Heart USB to Serial uploader for Arduino compatible boards.

In the picture below you can see the components of the DIY Version and in the video you can follow the tutorial and learn how to assembled it!

We are excited to announce that OpenTracker v2 by Tigal is our new partner in the Arduino At Heart Program and ready to be backed in an Indiegogo campaign.

OpenTracker is a  fully open source commercial grade GPS/GLONASS vehicle tracker that comes with a free web interface for tracking it on Googlemaps or OpenStreetMaps.

The interface allows the tracking of a single vehicle or larger fleets simultaneously: currently it is possible to track the location, speed, altitude, heading, and address of the vehicle as well as save logs of location data for later use. With additional sensors it is also possible to track humidity, temperature and other parameters when desired.

The OpenTracker v2 is the second version of the original OpenTracker with many improved features, and a significant reduction in price.

Let’s have a look at some tech specs. The OpenTracker v2 is ready to run out-of-the-box and includes the same powerful 32-bit ATMEL SAM3A8C ARM controller as the Arduino Due, a Quectel M95 GSM/GPRS modem for wireless connectivity, a Quectel L76 GPS/GLONASS module with Assisted GPS, CAN-BUS, plenty of I/O options and a wide operating temperature range of -35°C to +80°C. The included CAN-BUS, plentiful I/O and on-board GSM/GPRS modem can be used to create many interesting applications such as CAN-BUS logger, SMS Gateway, SMS Remote Controller, and Weather Station with SMS notifications to name a few.

The OpenTracker v2 is available as a complete bundle including the Board, High-Quality Aluminum Enclosure, Power and Programming Cable as well as a GSM/GPS Antenna, or as a stand-alone board for those interested in using the board as an enhanced Arduino Due. The free online tracking interface is available at opentracker.tigal.com.

Support them on Indiegogo! (only a couple of days left but it’s flexible funding and going ahead with the manufacturing in any case!)

It’s time to announce a new partner in the Arduino At Heart program!

Nix, The Diamond Standard In Color Measurement, is a unique device capable of determining the exact color of any object or surface in RGB, CMYK, HTML, Lab, and even specific paint from your favorite brand. Imagine a Photoshop eyedropper in real life: Nix is a small, durable, buttonless tool that can easily fit in your pocket or bag.

It’s a useful device especially for graphic designers, interior designers, artists, photographers, hobbyists, anyone who wants to become a colour expert. It utilizes Bluetooth 4.0 technology to display the exact color on your iOS or Android device. Once scanned, you can keep palettes of your favorite colors, match the color to real life pigments, and even receive directions to the nearest store where you can purchase the color.

On top of that Nix is ultra hackable. You can easily reprogram it with all the familiar tools available in the Arduino IDE.

Take a look at their successful kickstarter campaign page and at the video below to learn more :

Nix Color Sensor is designed and assembled in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada by Nix Sensor Ltd and its CEO Matt Sheridan (info@nixsensor.com) is available to answer all your questions. If you want to make it yours, visit the webesite nixsensor.com .