Planet Arduino

Arduino have released the latest version of their Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Version 2.0 and it is a big step up from the previous release, boasting plenty of new features to help you to develop your code more easily.

As the de-facto way for beginners to get into programming hardware, more experienced users have sometimes complained about what they see as the over-simplistic IDE — even lacking relatively basic features such as autocomplete. The new version provides this, and much more besides.

The press-release from Arduino offers a few clues to the main features, but the real detail is tucked away in a range of new tutorials, designed to get you up to speed with the new look.

The main screen is organised differently, to show off the new capabilities and to make development faster and easier. The new “Remote Sketchbook” has been integrated closely with the Arduino Cloud, to allow for easy switching between computers during development. V2.0 will pick up any Cloud sketches automatically, while computers using the previous versions of the IDE can still access the sketches via the Web Editor as before.

The Serial Plotter can now be used at the same time as the text Serial Monitor, rather than having to choose one or the other. In addition, there is a host of new Debug functionality for those devices that support it. This works with the usual In-Circuit Emulators (such as the Atmel ICE), but also natively with newer Arduino boards like the Arduino Zero without any additional hardware. The debugger gives you access to powerful features like Breakpoints, Step-Into and Step-Over to really understand what your code is doing.

Installation is straightforward, and will automatically pull in any libraries and sketches that you created in previous versions of the Arduino software to ease the transition.

There’s a lot to like in the new IDE, but we expect it will take a little while to discover and use all the new features effectively.  Some of them are carry-overs from the “Arduino Pro IDE” that we covered a few years ago, but it’s great to see the software evolve and improve over time.

Have you tried new new IDE yet?  What are your thoughts on how it compares to the older version, or other development environments?  Let us know in the comments.

Thanks to [cardboardBaron] for the tip.

The Tamagotchi is a thing of the past. Bring your virtual pet into the 21st century with LEDs and an Arduino-compatible processor.

Read more on MAKE

The post Petduino Is the DIY Tamagotchi You Can Hack appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

For the third time, next October 10th & 11th, Munich will host push.conference a unique 2-day event for the interactive professional field, uniting the potential and skillset of a new generation of creative coders, interaction designers and creative technologists with the established UX/UI scene. (discount code at the end of this post!)

With a comprehensive and diverse program, the conference lives up to this with 10 headliner talks and 8 inspiring lightning talks from design consultancies, companies and creatives such as Ben Fry (Founder Processing), Lauren McCarthy (Interaction Artist), Mike Tucker (Universal Everything), Josh Carpenter (Virtual Reality Researcher Mozilla), Daniel Burka & Braden Kowitz (Google Ventures), Markus Eckert (Motion Code Magician) and many more.

If you want to get inspired by the great minds on stage, get in touch with enthusiasts of connected fields, meet agencies looking for talents or maybe find your next team members yourself, register to the conference with the Discount Code (early bird fare) for Arduino fans and lasting 2 weeks from now:  pf214ard3x9.

Read the full article on MAKE

At the beginning of march Christopher Martin, researcher in applied computer,  wrote us an email to tell us that he got involved in an ambitious plan taking place:  100 school pupils, 5 different digital-maker themes in 1 day for 4 subsequent weeks across Scotland.

The event called “One Day Digital” started on the 2nd of March at the Dundee University, where he is based,  and is organized by Nesta, supported by the Nominet Trust, O2 Think Big and the Scottish Government which created it as part of a wider programme called “Digital Makers” . It is especially aimed at:

encourage and enable a generation of young people to create, rather than simply consume, technology. Working closely with a consortium of partners, we are launching a campaign to highlight the benefits of learning digital skills and encourage innovation in digital education to equip young people with the skills they need to thrive in the digital world.

Chris  was running the Arduino session supporting  12 students (age 13/14) on their first steps with C programming and some bread boarding with Arduino UNO.  He wrote on his blog:

After a fairly intense 2 hours or so lights had flashed, dials had been turned and various coding techniques learned. It was really interesting to see how quickly the loose association of school pupils came together as a team, eagerly helping each other when they could. After a well earned lunch we moved on to some more output modes and looked at writing functions to control an RGB LED and used a bunch of variable resistors to make a colour mixer. I think the highlight was the getting the speaker to play different tones, controlling the pitch with one variable resistor and the timing with the other. Quite eerily the air was full of monotonic blips and beeps like a room of R2D2s.

It’s great to see teens getting involved and inspired by tinkering and coding. If you are interested in attending one of their two upcoming events (23rd and 30th of March) click here,  or keep receiving info about ongoing activities  from Facebook.

Codebreaker is the exhibition started last year at  the Science Museum of London and celebrating  the centenary of the birth of computing pioneer Alan Turing.

Hirsch&Mann were commissioned to create a “series of exhibits which demonstrated and recognized the progress in computing while at the same time representing a spirit of engineering and innovation” .

They created three installations that demonstrated 3 programming principles:

LOOPING: A spinning rotor with LEDs on it -> creating POV patterns all controlled by 30 arcade style illuminated switches.

CONDITIONALS: A version of Wolfram’s cellular automata – user was able to choose the result of the child node once the parent node conditions were met

VARIABLES: A mechanical tree – the branch angles were controlled by sliders on the console. Slider A controlled 1 angles at the base of the tree, slider 2 controlled the next 2 angles, slider 3, the next 4 angles and slider 4 the final 8 sliders.

Each installation has a light box which is revealed as soon as you press the BIG GLOWING button on the console. This turns on the lightbox – which has simplified pseudo code and essentially allows people to “step into” the code. Each line that is currently running is highlighted and then you see the result on the installation.

The whole point of these installations was to show where we have come since Turing’s time and stepping on his shoulders.

If you have the chance to visit the exhibition (it’s free!) or watch the video below you will see that at the center of each console there is an Arduino UNO.

 
[srejbi] shares a new, programming-free, API-based way to programming Arduino: the APDuino project (minimum hw requirements: Arduino Mega 2560 + W5100 EtherShield). The Apduino relates to a peculiar approach towards Arduino that I noticed in the last years: using Arduino and making things without coding. This is a good thing for people that can’t code, but has to be simpler than learning code itself.

The APDuino Project provides a turn-key software solution for building custom monitoring and automation systems with custom rulesets (featuring expression evaluator with access to sensor and control arrays), cron-like scheduler, remote access and management via HTTP, SD and online logging and more…

All *without* programming (if using supported hardware components) … allowing DIY’ers to build their own automation systems much quicker and easier.

– The image collage attached is showing parts of 1 realization I built (I have 4 completely different systems running, all using the same software ) — This one pictures an aquaponics monitoring system with 16 physical sensors (lots of 1-wire DS18B20′s chained, DHT-11, photoresistors, HY-SRF05 with mechanically inverted reading surface providing tank level monitoring, radio-controlled sockets allow pump and fan controls).

Other systems feature components such as vibration detector, pH probe, BMP085,DS1307 RTC.

via [apduino.org], [Apduino on github]