Planet Arduino

It was a long Monday with the Arduino forum closed for maintenance, wasn’t it? Many people had to hold back their Arduino-related questions for an entire day… panic! But before getting mad at us, read on and you’ll understand it was for an extremely good cause.

We migrated the forum to a new, modern, platform which provides a dramatically improved user experience. Try it now at forum.arduino.cc! It’s fast, clean, practical, and mobile-friendly. The new interface helps focus on contents, share knowledge and generate quality interactions between people.

New Forum Features

• No more pages to browse manually.
• Long conversations are loaded dynamically while scrolling.
• Notifications are shown when someone mentions you or replies to your posts.
• Links are expanded with previews. Long conversations can be automatically summarized.
• Trust levels and other tools help fight spamming and encourage good behaviors.

And there’s a lot more!

The new forum is built on Discourse, which is the leading forum platform and is 100% open source. This makes the Arduino forum into the largest Discourse forum in the world, with over one million users and more than five million posts. We partnered with the Discourse team to perform this long and complex migration. It was great to collaborate with people who believe in quality, human-centric software and open source as much as we do.

A big thank you also goes out to all the volunteer moderators who help newcomers and keep things in order. They do an incredible job.

Spending time in the forum, reading conversations and answering questions is a great learning opportunity. Join the Arduino community now!

Forum Notes

User images (avatars) won’t be visible for a few hours because they’re being imported. There’s also some minor formatting in posts that hasn’t been applied yet, like emoticons and underlined text. There’s a job running in the background job which is working on things. Everything will appear automatically as soon as the process is complete. But we wanted to reopen the forum as soon as possible.

These are the most important things you need to know if you’re used to the old forum:

• Drafts are automatically saved while typing. No need to click “Save Draft”.
• The “Add Karma” button is not there any more because we now have message likes. If you want to show your appreciation, click the “Like” icon under a post.
• The “Report to moderator” link has been replaced by the “Flag” button.
• You can configure your notification preferences on a per-category or per-topic basis by clicking the bell icon at the top-right.
• There’s no “Print” button any more. Just use the print function of your browser and a printer-friendly rendering will be applied.
• You can now bookmark your favorite posts. Bookmarks are found, along with your notifications, mentions and history, by clicking on the avatar icon at the top right.

Should you notice issues with the new forum, let us know.

The post The Arduino Forum is now completely renovated (and it’s so nice) appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Don’t worry if you’re unable to access certain areas of the Arduino website next Monday (April 12th). We’re carrying out some scheduled maintenance to bring you a few exciting new features.

Primarily we’re updating the forum platform. This is a project we’ve been planning for a while, especially since the forums are getting so busy. The current system has served us well over the years, but it’s time for an upgrade.

Areas Affected by Scheduled Maintenance

• The Arduino Forum will be offline for the entire day as it’s migrated to the new platform.

In order to take the community to the next level, we’re moving over to Discourse. This will give you a vastly improved user experience, a better interface and a lot more options for editing and formatting your posts. It was a pretty easy choice for Arduino, since Discourse is very well established, robust, and it’s also open source. As you know, this is a philosophy that’s at the core of everything Arduino, so it was important for us to choose a forum platform that has similar values.

Once we’ve moved everything over to Discourse and your new forum is up and running, we’ll give you lots more info on all the great new features and functions. Until then, please bear with us as the changes and upgrades are carried out.

The post April 12th: Scheduled maintenance planned for the Arduino website appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Some areas of the Arduino website will be temporarily unavailable on Tuesday, April 6th.

Don’t worry if you’re unable to access certain areas of the Arduino website next Tuesday (April 6th). We’re carrying out some scheduled maintenance to bring you a few exciting new features.

Areas Affected by Maintenance

• Login will be offline between 7AM and 10AM CET  (any service requiring login like Arduino Store, Create Editor and IoT Cloud are impacted)

Other Arduino services might also experience a reduced performance during the day, as part of the maintenance works.t.

The post 6th April – Scheduled Maintenance Planned for the Arduino Website appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Libraries are files written in C or C++ which provide sketches with extra functionality, for example the ability to control an LED matrix, read an encoder, connect to a sensor, display, or module, etc. They are very useful to lower the barriers for creating amazing interactive projects and use a wide range of components.  Libraries can be created by everyone and shared with the open source community!

To use an existing library in a sketch you can use the Library Manager (available from IDE version 1.6.2), open the IDE and click to the “Sketch” menu and then Include Library > Manage Libraries and follow the Guide on this page.

If you want contribute with a new library for an Arduino or a Genuino board, you are welcome to do so. The best way to start is to learn how to turn a sketch into a library and when you are good at it, learn how to code with basic Arduino principles in mind in order to allow beginners to get started with Arduino easily. Follow the Guidelines at this page, here’s a preview of what you’ve find:

Be kind to the end user. Assume you are writing an API for an intelligent person who has not programmed before. Come up with a clear mental model of the concept you’re working with, and the terms and functions you will use.

Use full, everyday words. Don’t be terse with your function names or variables. Use everyday terms instead of technical ones. Pick terms that correspond to popular perception of the concept at hand. Don’t assume specialized knowledge. For example, this is why we used analogWrite() rather than pwm(). Abbreviations are acceptable, though, if they’re in common use or are the primary name for something.For example, “HTML” is relatively common and “SPI” is effectively the name of that protocol (“serial-peripheral interface” is probably too long). (“Wire” was probably a mistake, as the protocol it uses is typically called “TWI” or “I2C”.)

Avoid words that have different meanings to the general public. For example, to programmers, an error is a notification that something happened. To the general public, errors are bad things.

When you are ready, you can share your new library and documentation on this dedicated area of the Forum.

Everyone knows Pong, the first commercially successful arcade video game machine  originally release by Atari in 1972. In those years the game helped to establish the video game industry and nowadays is often used by makers to experiment with creating game consoles with Arduino.

Roberto Melzi recently shared on the Arduino forum a new version of Pong made with Arduino Uno:

Thanks to the VGAx library done by Smaffer, based on the previous work done by Nick Gammon, I have done a little color game for an Arduino Uno working for a VGA monitor. See for details here:

The target was to use an Arduino Uno board without special shields and supporting IC.
the fundamental components are a button, a potentiometer, few resistors and DSUB15 connector.

Tale a look at the video to see it in action:

Follow the step-by-step guide on Instructables to build one yourself.

The last couple of months have been the most exciting of my entire career. Here at Arduino we are doing a big shift in terms of technology, user experience, and web improvements.

A new Arduino web ecosystem is arising, and the first hint of this new approach is visible in the Arduino Day website. This single-page website was the perfect fit to start experimenting with some new technologies we wanted to put in production. The Arduino Day website was a testbed for some new features of the new architecture we want to achieve.

Goals

1. Website online and running 99.98% of the time
2. Fast on every device
3. Easy way to push updates online
4. New theme with a single page app
5. Clear division between presentation and functionalities (client/server architecture)
6. Https whenever is possible
7. Microservices

People

How did we achieve these results? It has been a challenge but, from November on, we started building a new Web team with a good mix of junior and more experienced developers. Putting together the team has been key, but we also needed to change some aspects of the way we work.

The team has been always under a tight schedule, at first we started fixing legacy bugs all around, many are still in progress, but we also started experimenting with new things. We started following the agile development methods, including a daily standup meeting to better coordinate our team of designers and developers, we create dedicated topic channel in our chat system to better tackle issues and follow the improvements roadmap, and we created clear todo lists organized by priority.

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