Planet Arduino

Last June Arduino partnered with Seeedstudio to manufacture Genuino boards for the chinese market and during Maker Faire Rome Massimo Banzi took part to an interesting panel to promote  4 chinese delegates from business, education, design and research domains presenting their work and discussing what does it mean to be a maker in China. (in the pic from left to right, Lin, Massimo, Alessio, Jin, Chenille & Flamingo).

The panel titled Making beyond the Wall and moderated by Alessio Jacona tried to address the growing maker movement in China which is not so visible to the European community while the hype of manufacture in Shenzhen, the Chinese Silicon Valley, is gaining more and more international media attention.

Flamingo was the first presenter of the session. Indeed he was also the first person to use Arduino boards in China back in 2007. As an evangelist, he taught physical interactions in China Central Academy of Fine Arts and even started the digital firm K1ND Beijing with Ogilvy China, which focus on interactive design with open source technologies for business projects.

He introduced LightBot (watch video on youku) made in collaboration with Jun Huang, an architect based in China. It’s an installation using LEDs as a brush to draw on light-sensitive canvas. The material on the wall glows after being exposed to light, particularly ultraviolet light, and fades away after some time. Lightbox is powered by an Arduino controlling 1024 LED lights installed on the pallet and stepper motors to control the movement.

Then it was the turn for  Jin  introducing Minibuilder and Candy Project (we featured her work in our blog earlier) created during her fellowship at Iaac. With her international background, Jin explained how she realized how the culture of making in China is focusing more on hardware startups with strong potential to accelerate thanks to great manufacturing opportunities. Whereas in the West, people see it more as a hobby or prefer to explore the conceptual development in a lab environment.  Nowadays she is implementing a new VR projects in China.

Later Lin explained his work as a tutor at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing and also his commitment as a community manager of mechanics and robotics in arduino.cn forum, the community of Arduino fans who also participated to Arduino Day. He worked on various projects and applied Arduino in hemiplegia rehabilitation equipment through sensor feedback and in a gearbox to detect malfunctions through vibration, temperature and stress.

Last but not least, Chenille talked about how he wrote the first book about Arduino in China and more recently, translated the third edition of Getting started with Arduino book into Chinese. He’s now working on a brainwave-controlled music player.

The panel was a good chance to present to an european crowd real experiences from the voice of chinese makers and sharing good practices for future collaborations.

Are you based in China and  want to share a project made with an Arduino or Genuino board? Submit it to the blog, we’d like to feature it and tell your story!

Makeblock founder, Jasen Wang, talks about the growing role of the Maker Movement in China.

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The post Makeblock: A Construction Set for the 21st Century appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Arduino/Genuino team were in China last month to be part of Shenzhen Maker Faire and present to local makers the new Genuino boards, together with Seeedstudio. They  also had the pleasure to meet with Arduino users, teachers, students and makers of all ages with great skills.
Here’s a selection of pictures form those amazing days (all the pictures are on our Flickr).

Thanks to all the people visiting our booth and warmly welcoming us in China!

Today, June 20th, 2015, Massimo Banzi, Co-founder of Arduino, and Eric Pan, founder and CEO of Seeedstudio announced at Maker Faire Shenzhen 2015 a strategic partnership between Arduino LLC and Seeedstudio.

Seeedstudio will manufacture and distribute Arduino LLC products using the new Genuino brand in China and other Asian markets.

The new Genuino name certifies the authenticity of boards, in line with the open hardware and open source philosophy that has always characterized Arduino. Genuino is Arduino LLC new sister-brand created by co-founders Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe and David Mellis for markets outside of the USA.

“We are very excited to partner with SeeedStudio to manufacture our products in China. We’ve known and appreciated Seeed for years, we share the same values and I think they are one of the most forward looking companies in China” said Massimo Banzi.

And he also explained about Genuino: “Arduino is very popular in China but the brand is used heavily without permission. Genuino allows the market to clearly identify which products are contributing to the Open Source Hardware process. With Genuino, the Arduino.cc community will easily be able to recognize the partners who are contributing to support the development of the platform.”

Eric Pan, founder of Seeedstudio, explained: “Arduino is becoming a global language of making, we are proud to help provide Genuino branded localized products to carry on the conversation in China. Here we already have a huge Arduino user base and growing, it’s time to get us involved deeper with global ecosystem. “

Genuino-branded products will be sold on Seeed’s store on Taobao and soon on http://www.genuino.cc.

The partnership between Arduino LLC and Seeedstudio is a bold new step of a global development plan by Arduino LLC. Arduino LLC has recently launched the Genuino brand and is already working with market-leading, innovative manufacturers/distributors in Asia, Europe, South America, Canada and Africa.

(originally posted on Makezine)

Right after the overwhelming experience of Maker Faire Rome I left Europe for a week a quick tour in China. There are a lot of cool things happening there. I’d been to China twice before for a very short time so this time I wanted to spend a few days to meet with people and take part in some cool events going on in Shanghai and Shenzhen. I accepted an invitation to give a talk about Arduino at the School of Design of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and while I was there, William Liang (adjunt assistant professor at the same university) took me to visit the local community at the Dim Sum Lab hackerspace.

Dim sum is a delicious, Hong Kong speciality composed of a myriad of different, bite-sized delights. Similarly, the DimSum Lab hosts different types of communities with various interests, from coders to makers.

I then flew to Shenzhen to meet with the people at SeedStudio who took me around the city to discover the different opportunities this city offers. Makers are closer to the manufacturers here and have easier access to new components and parts. Clearly there is an advantage and certain makers, if they get organized, can jump quickly from a small idea to large scale manufacturing for a much lower cost.

This happens because they are not only close to manufacturers, but closer to the supply chain as 90 percent of electronic parts are made in China and you can basically assemble a device very quickly because of easy access to parts. Recently, Seeds Studio published the Maker Map of Shenzhen which looks a bit like the celeb’s house map you get in Los Angeles, but instead of getting information on where famous actors live, you can easily find out where suppliers, manufacturers and hackerspaces are.

There are also lots of projects based on Arduino. We realized more than 90 percent of the boards people use are fake, not even Arduino clones, but fakes. We discussed this topic with SeedStudio which has always been very respectful of the Arduino project and of the use of our trademark. It’s understandable, in a way, that an Arduino made in Europe tends to be quite expensive for most of the people in China. We know that the interest in Arduino is very high and we are working on how to provide official Arduino boards in China.

As we often said, it’s not only about making boards and selling them. It’s about creating all the official documentation in Chinese, having an official forum and social media presence, and making videos and sharing them outside of YouTube (inaccessible for many Chinese people). We clearly need to change the way we do things to be able to interact with the Chinese community. It’s going to take a bit than just focusing on providing accessible boards.

Later, when we visited the local hackerspace in Shenzhen called Chaihuo, some of the people I met there had just come back from Maker Faire Rome. They showed me all the pictures they took and it was amazing how they reported back to their peers the experiences they had in Italy and the projects they discovered during the event. During the Q&A session we had, they asked me a lot of really detailed questions and Eric Pan, from Seeds Studio, did a great job in translating my answers.

Next stop was Shanghai where I gave a talk at the Sino-Finnish Centre at College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University. I visited the community of the XinCheJian hackerspace and then participated in HackedMatter, a whole day focused on rethinking manufacturing from the point of view of science fiction narratives and exploring “how the professionalizing of maker culture is developing increasingly intimate relations with the small-scale factory owners and micro-entrepreneurs that make up China’s core of hardware manufacturing”.  The event was organized by Silvia Lindter in conjunction with the Shanghai Maker Carnival.

During Hacked Matter I gave a talk on the topic of collaboration, a concept at the heart of the Arduino approach, highlighting the idea that innovation is not purely about technology, but more on creating the right collaborations with the right people.

It was interesting to note that the maker community in Shanghai is pretty diverse and composed not only by locals as there are a lot of people coming originally from outside China who moved there. At the Maker Carnival I discovered many high quality projects and realized some differences with the community in Shenzhen. It was also interesting to understand how Chinese culture works and how Arduino can create channels to communicate within that culture.

Open hardware companies from around the world could clearly benefit from a trip to China especially if they can find someone local to work with, tapping into the local community to go beyond language barriers. There’s a lot of very talented people over there able to deal with complicated projects. At the various hackerspaces I visited I received interesting questions and I was lucky enough to have someone translating otherwise I’d never met these smart people.

Right after the overwhelming experience of Maker Faire Rome I left Europe for a week a quick tour in China. There are a lot of cool things happening there. I'd been to China twice before for a very short time so this time I wanted to spend a few days to meet with people and take part in some cool events going on in Shanghai and Shenzhen.

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