Planet Arduino

At the end of May, Massimo Banzi and Giorgio Olivero (Todo) spent some days at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design to teach a class called Connected Objects. The class goal was to envision, design and implement interactive objects that are open and connected, whose design and behaviour can be used to sense, read and affect the domestic landscape or other shared environments.

One of the team of students (Arun Mota, Hsiang-Lin Yang, Yashodeep Gholap) worked on Arduino Yún to create an energy redistribution service that allows people to save money and in parallel donate towards energy distribution projects in deprived areas of the world:

LightUp is an interactive fundraising coin jar that firstly encourages personal savings and then also allows people to contribute a part of their savings towards the cause. The system allows them to track in real-time exactly how many units of electricity they helped generate. Another visible reward is the jar lights up for 10 minutes each time they drop a coin.

To avail the service of LightUp, a user merely needs to register through an online platform. Every registered user is then provided with a physical jar to make savings on periodical basis. Users can save coins in these jars. Every time a coin is dropped in it, as a response the jar lights up for 10 minutes.

The drop of a coin each time also triggers a parallel transaction where a certain sum of money is transferred from the user’s account to LightUp’s Account. While registering, LightUp will also create a personal PayPal account for its users. This PayPal account is linked to the merchant PayPal account of LightUp. The user gets to decide the unit of money that can be debited each time while registering.

Every time users put coins in the LightUp jar, they will also receive immediate feedbacks such as SMS, email or facebook notification as per user’s preferences. These feedbacks will inform users on how their donation is being used for specific social projects and how they have helped make a real difference.

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.

Holger from Fablab Düsseldorf writes in about a small robot they prototyped with Arduino Uno, helping them  raise some funds for their local space:

We created the idea in our non-commerical FabLab in Düsseldorf, Germany to create a small robot, who makes our vistors and guests aware of placing a small money donation. This robot was required to be transportable, robust and to draw as much attention as possible.
Thus, we included LED-Stripes, servos, sensors and sound to the project. Packed in a very old german vacuum cleaner. The work took about 1 year to construct, print and integrate all 3D-printed parts, wiring and software development with the Arduino Uno. But software development was the minor part, although parallel processing on the Arduino in order to run every component simultaneously required a small trick.

These are the components in action:

• Controller: Arduino Uno R3
• Software: Standard Processing and standard libraries
• Audio: VLSI VS1000 Audio Module incl. our own firmware that lets the Arduino control the board
• Distancesensor: HC-SR04 embedded in a modelled nose of FIMO
• 4 LED stripes (2 RGB on the backside)
• 6 power-LEDs for the top
• 1 servo for moving the top
• 1 Servo for moving the bill-mouth
• 3 distance sensors for bill and coin detection
• 1 switch for muting the audio module and 1 reset button

Take a look at the video below, learn the details on their blog and visit them during the Arduino Day (yes, they are organising an event in their space)!