Planet Arduino

We’re happy to share with you the update of the Indiegogo campaign of the Arduino At Heart for home automation we presented some time ago. Ez Control goes wireless!

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We have been silent for most of the time of this campaign, but this doesn’t means that we were sleeping. Not at all!

We were listening and interacting. We have received your comments, we have followed the topic on Reddit, we have exchanged ideas with many of you and we spent all this time improving our product.

Some of you was concerned about the relay, maybe too small. Some other concern was related to the position of the temperature sensor, that could offer false reading caused by the heat from other components.

We have upgraded the relay with a new one, rated 5A, and we have also improved the physical insulation for the high voltage circuit. We have then improved the insulation of the temperature sensor.

Sure all interesting, but those where not the main doubts about our hardware.

The most requested upgrade was related to the connectivity.

Why in 2014 do we use wires?

We admit that going wireless it was in our plans for the future. We wanted to start with an easy to use board, affordable and based on well known technologies, open to most of the users.

Reading and listening all your comments, we have understood that we should change our plan, and we did it.

Yes! We spent the past month with design, engineering, prototyping and testing of the brand new and immediately available EZboard WiFi!

This means that every perk and everyone will receive NOT the old board based on the cables and 10Mbit Ethernet controller, but this new, fantastic, WiFi development board.

And the price will not change!!!

Andrea & the EZBoard team

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Read all the info on Indiegogo and support them now!

To celebrate the new littleBits ArduinoAtHeart Module, littleBits has partnered with Arduino for a huge give away!

Entering is easy, just sign up on this page for your chance to win an incredible littleBits + Arduino collection. One lucky winner will receive a littleBits Deluxe Kit, littleBits Arduino Starter Bundle, and Arduino Starter Kit. All together a $400 value!

The contest started Monday, June the 9th and runs through June 22nd, so enter soon!

The winner will be announced on or before June 27th.

Sign in with your Facebook account with your email on this page >>>

This week we are delighted to announce a new Arduino At Heart Partner targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily: Blend Micro.

Blend Micro, by RedBearLab is an integrated developement board “blend”ing Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a single board.

In the following videos, you can see how easy it is to use Blend Micro with the companion Apps for both iOS and Android. See how to control digital output, PWM and Servo, obtain readings from digital or analog inputs.

On their website you can find some sample codes on how to write your own Apps too. They soon will provide a boot loader update which allow the Blend Micro to be programmed over-the-air from Bluetooth Smart Ready portable devices and PCs, no USB wire is required for uploading the sketch.

If you want Blend Micro now, it’s available in the Arduino Store.

Today we want to introduce you to a new Arduino at Heart Partner launching on Kickstarter this week: Hummingbird Duo is an electronics kit designed to be fun and educational for a fourth grader, a high school student, a college engineering student, or an adult maker.

Hummingbird Duo  creates a bridge between making and classroom education combining craft materials, electronic components and drag &drop programming. Part of Hummingbird’s mission is, in fact, to explode common conceptions of how robotics can be used in K-12 education:

 We have designed several levels of learning into the Hummingbird experience. Instead of a steep learning curve, learners go up a staircase where each step increases skills and where mastering each step allows one to use the Hummingbird in a new and more interesting way.

The kit was developed by BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh, PA firm founded by Tom Lauwers in 2010 to commercialize educational technology developed by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute’s CREATE lab and since 2012, they have pledged 1% of their net profits to the Computer Science Teacher’s Association.

Support them on Kickstarter!

Today and tomorrow you visit us at the Arduino booth (#204) right next to Atmel booth (#205) and have a look at our cool demos. You’ll find all the new boards: Arduino TRE Development Edition and Arduino ZERO, Arduino Yún together with Temboo and the freshly baked Arduino at Heart littleBits Module!

Massimo Banzi keynote is scheduled at 4.00PM and Michael Shiloh’s Getting Started with Arduino talks are waiting for you 2 times a day.

We are looking forward to see you all and we give a big “thank you”  to all our volunteers who are supporting us this weekend, talking with hundreds of people visiting our booth and showing their passion for Arduino!

We are excited to announce that littleBits joined the Arduino At Heart Program to easily incorporate programming into littleBits circuits!

littleBits Arduino Module is everything you know and love about Arduino without the breadboarding, soldering or wiring.  littleBits takes care of the electronics, while you focus on the code.

The new littleBits Arduino Module allows to:

• Create code using the Arduino programming environment
• Communicate with software (Processing, MaxMSP, Flash etc…)
• Play with 3 inputs and 3 outputs using littleBits bitSnap™ magnetic connector as well as additional I/O for advanced hardware interaction
• Getting started with 10 sketches, including Analog Pong, Tone Libraries and more!
• Access to Arduino AND littleBits community support

Inventing on this platform requires the user to be able to debug through electronics issues as well as software bugs.
For example, instead of having to solder together a complete circuit of power, ground, resistors and LEDs, a user can simply snap a power and an LED module to the Arduino module and dive straight into programming. This will make hardware innovation even more friendly for beginners, and further lower the entry to physical computation.

Take a look at the video and discover what  you could do with it!

A connected home is in the dreams of many of us and we all spent at least a few moments thinking about how would it be for real. The problem is that most of the hardware devices and software platforms are not designed to work together and that’s why things become complicated.

Today we introduce you to a new Arduino At Heart project called EZcontrol.IT, crowdfunding now on Indiegogo, and designed to simplify the world  of internet of things:

EZcontrol.IT offers dedicated hardware that is affordable and easy to use, compatible and programmable with the Arduino™ IDE and language; designed to interact with a full and extensive software platform: Lelylan, that is an open, easy to use and personalize, cloud platform for Home Automation.

The project is composed by:

•  EZboard, a low power consumption Arduino compatible board, equipped with an onboard Ethernet controller, microSD card socket, temperature sensor, and power relay. It’s designed to run for long periods of time powered by batteries and it integrates all the hardware necessary to implement most of the common applications for Home Automation.
• Leylan platform, a very easy to use Home Automation cloud platform, universally compatible with any device capable of being connected to the web. It’s  based on the MQTT protocol (MQ Telemetry Transport), the same used by Facebook to send live updates to the mobile messaging applications, and offers a simple API that can be used to program basically any platform.

EZcontrol.IT decided to join the Arduino AtHeart program to better identify this solution as dedicated to makers, and to remark the compatibility with the Arduino platform at the highest possible level.

EZboard in bundle with Lelylan is available starting today for a short initial period of pre-order, with packages for makers and extremely affordable early-birds offers. Make your pledge!

Primo‘s team sent us exciting news from their HQ about their contribution to the open source community. After the successful Kickstarter campaign to launch the wooden play-set that uses shapes, colours and spacial awareness to teach programming logic through a tactile, warm and magical learning experience, they took a step further. They released all the documentation and the instructions to produce a Primo prototype,  different from the product that they make and sell.

We just finished the first edition of the Primo play-set open documentation, that includes the design files that we used to make our first prototype and a step-by-step guide to make your own version of the Primo play set. This “maker” version of our product can be assembled using rapid prototyping techniques and common tools like Arduino boards.

We recently published a preview of this documentation just for our Kickstarter backers, who already started to build their projects and to translate the document in their language. The FabLab in São Paulo for example already translated it in Brasilian Portuguese, while other languages like Dutch, Italian and Japanese are now in progress.

The whole documentation is completely transparent: it’s written in Markdown using Jekyll and GitHub pages. In this way it is very easy for creators to modify, translate and use it as a starting point for their projects.

In parallel we are developing an industrial version of our product, using manufacture-quality materials and custom Arduino-compatible electronic boards.

And if you want to read about the experience of a dad making a DIY version in 1 month and a half of work, follow this link.

Primo is an Arduino At Heart partner. If you have a great project based on Arduino and want to join the program, read the details and then get in touch with us.

Interacting with objects in a new way has always been the main focus of Digital Habits, a design studio based in Milan.  Today we are proud to announce they’ve become a partner  of the Arduino At Heart program with their new project called Cromatica (it was exhibited at the coveted Fuorisalone Milan Design Week in the Superstudio Temporary Museum for New Design and started the crowdfunding campaign just some days ago!).

Cromatica is half speaker and half desk lamp: it can be controlled through a natural gestural interface, touch sensors or remotely via the Cromatica Android and iOS app. Designed to deliver both light and sound functions, Cromatica features wireless 4.0 Bluetooth connection for streaming music and a RGB lamp for multiple ambient effects.

Cromatica is embedded with an Arduino allowing for a highly digital, multi-sensory music and desktop working experience.  It blends  light and sound functionalities in unexpected ways, taking IoT products to a new level of quality.  For example you can download the app for natural awakening: light will rise and music streaming will start allowing you to wake up to your favourite playlist, perfect for early mornings.

Take a look at the video for the Natural Interaction:

In the video below you can see how you can create your favorite ambient  to match with your mood:

Innocenzo Rifino, Director of Digital Habits, told us:

“The Cromatica is a multi-purpose light-speaker but it is also our vision of the evolution of electronics, a vision that is moving in a more human and open direction. Crowdrooster have helped tremendously by opening our product up to a wider community whilst giving us the chance to generate enough funding to share our concepts more widely.”

The Cromatica is also true to its maker roots being Open Source and hackable, opening the doors for endless innovation from the maker community as it can be adapted to integrate with other tech and the Internet of Things. To enable this there will be a special ‘Maker Edition’ campaign reward complete with digital file to 3D print the shell.

Take a look at their campaign Crowdrooster and make your pledge!
Crowdrooster, the new ‘all tech’ crowdfunding site, introduced Cromatica as the first maker project available for funding on the site.

As some of you have already noticed on our social channels, we are thrilled to announce a new partner in the Arduino at Heart Program: MicroView, the first chip-sized Arduino compatible that lets you see what your Arduino is thinking using an OLED display.

Microview, by Geek Ammo, is versatile as it meets the needs of beginners and experts alike.

For beginners the MicroView is the first Arduino to ship with built in tutorials. Beyond the tutorials, the MicroView’s OLED display helps to visualize what the microcontroller is doing. You can print print debug messages straight to the OLED display without needing to connect to the Arduino IDE. The immediacy of being able to see live sensor values makes the whole experience so much easier.

A rich library saves experts time by allowing them to quickly display Strings, Counters, Gauges, Sliders, and Bitmaps with only a couple of lines of Arduino code.

Marcus Schappi, Geek Ammo CEO, told us:

“We’re proud that MicroView has been accepted to be part of the Arduino at Heart Program. By basing the MicroView on the architecture of the Arduino Uno, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. We can’t wait to see what people make with the MicroView.”

Their Kickstarter campaign is really going well, but the campaign only has a few days left, so get in quick and back the MicroView now so you don’t miss out!