via makezine.com
The Making of Arduino - IEEE Spectrum
Photo: Randi Silberman Klett
The Arduino core team [from left]—David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, Tom Igoe, David Mellis, and Massimo Banzi—get together at Maker Faire in New York City.
The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that’s where an unlikely new king was born.
The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place. Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.
Released in 2005 as a modest tool for Banzi’s students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), Arduino has spawned an international do-it-yourself revolution in electronics. You can buy an Arduino board for just about US \$30 or build your own from scratch: All hardware schematics and source code are available for free under public licenses. As a result, Arduino has become the most influential open-source hardware movement of its time.
The little board is now the go-to gear for artists, hobbyists, students, and anyone with a gadgetry dream. More than 250 000 Arduino boards have been sold around the world—and that doesn’t include the reams of clones. "It made it possible for people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise," says David A. Mellis, who was a student at IDII before pursuing graduate work at the MIT Media Lab and is the lead software developer of Arduino.
There are Arduino-based breathalyzers, LED cubes, home-automation systems, Twitter displays, and even DNA analysis kits. There are Arduino parties and Arduino clubs. Google has recently released an Arduino-based development kit for its Android smartphone. As Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher of Make magazine, the bible of DIY builders, puts it, Arduino has become "the brains of maker projects."
But Arduino isn’t just an open-source project that aims to make technology more accessible. It’s also a start-up company run by Banzi and a group of friends, and it’s facing a challenge that even their magic board can’t solve: how to survive success and grow. "We need to make the next jump," Banzi tells me, "and become an established company."
Arduino rose out of another formidable challenge: how to teach students to create electronics, fast. It was 2002, and Banzi, a bearded and avuncular software architect, had been brought on by IDII as an associate professor to promote new ways of doing interactive design—a nascent field sometimes known as physical computing. But with a shrinking budget and limited class time, his options for tools were few.
Like many of his colleagues, Banzi relied on the BASIC Stamp, a microcontroller created by California company Parallax that engineers had been using for about a decade. Coded with the BASIC programming language, the Stamp was like a tidy little circuit board, packing the essentials of a power supply, a microcontroller, memory, and input/output ports for attaching hardware. But the BASIC Stamp had two problems, Banzi discovered: It didn’t have enough computing power for some of the projects his students had in mind, and it was also a bit too expensive—a board plus basic parts could cost about US \$100. He also needed something that could run on Macintosh computers, which were ubiquitous among the IDII designers. What if they could make a board that suited their needs themselves?
Banzi had a colleague from MIT who had developed a designer-friendly programming language called Processing. Processing was rapidly gaining popularity because it allowed even inexperienced programmers to create complex—and beautiful—data visualizations. One of the reasons for its success was an extremely easy-to-use integrated development environment, or IDE. Banzi wondered if they could create similar software tools to code a microcontroller instead of graphics on a screen.
A student in the program, Hernando Barragán, took the first steps in that direction. He developed a prototyping platform called Wiring, which included both a user-friendly IDE and a ready-to-use circuit board. It was a promising project that continues to this day, but Banzi was already thinking bigger: He wanted to make a platform that was even simpler, cheaper, and easier to use.
![The Arduino core team [from left]—David Cuartielles, Gianluca Martino, Tom Igoe, David Mellis, and Massimo Banzi—get together at Maker Faire in New York City.](http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/arduino01-1319573198164.jpg)
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How To: The Basics of Breadboarding - YouTube
via youtube.com
Good introduction video on using a breadboard for your electronic experiments.
littleBits
via adafruit.com
This looks so cool. It is just very pricy. Not sure I could afford this for the kids I'm working with.
Favorite Product of the Day
via panavise.com
My favorite product of the day. My new PanaVise PV Jr. It is perfect for holding circuit boars while soldering. Just received two from Amazon.
Rover Remote-Control Wireless Spy Tank for iPad—Brookstone Exclusive!
via brookstone.com
I love the idea of controlling robots with cell phones. This just seems very cool. I would like to build a robot with an iPhone or iPod touch as its micro controller.
Robotics -- Boys' Life magazine
via boyslife.org
All the details you need to get started on the Boy Scouts Robotics merit badge. I hope to get all the kits and documentation ready and have a scout day at the house.
Arduino - Getting Started
Getting Started with Arduino
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Introduction: What Arduino is and why you'd want to use it. | Instructions for other boards: | | | | | Installation: Step-by-step instructions for setting up the Arduino software and connecting it to an Arduino Uno, Mega2560, Duemilanove, Mega, or Diecimila. | - Arduino Nano | | | - Arduino Mini | | - Windows | - Arduino BT | | - Mac OS X | - LilyPad Arduino | | - Linux (on the playground wiki) | - Arduino Fio | | | - Arduino Pro | | Environment: Description of the Arduino development environment. | - Arduino Pro Mini | | | - Xbee shield | | Troubleshooting: Advice on what to do if things don't work. | - Ethernet shield | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The text of the Arduino getting started guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Code samples in the guide are released into the public domain.
via arduino.cc
Book: The New Cool
This is a fantastic book about Robot competitions and how important the skills learned by the kids are valuable throughout life and to the future of our country. I highly recommend it to everyone interested in robots, education and building a strong country.
Arduino Uno Starter Kit
Just ordered this basic kit. I've been wanting to play with Arduino for a long time now. I think the boys will get a kick out of programming hardware and seeing what it can do. This is so much better than building plastic models that don't do anything after all your hard work.
My First Robot
When I was but a little teen, around 1980, I built my first robot. It was based on the book "How to Build a Computer Controlled Robot" by Tod Loofbourrow. Of course it was very clumsy those days, but it was programmable and you could sit on it and it would drive you around. Built around the 6502 processor KIM-1 it only had a hex display and keypad. This was before thumb drives, before CD/DVD drives, before hard drives, before floppy drives, and before cassette tape storage. Every program had to be entered by hand every time. All the programming was done in hex, oh what for a real assembler in those days.
I have memories of going to the junk yard and looking for metal pieces that could be cut or bent into the right shape for the frame and skin. I found an old green hi-way sign with the reflector paint still on it. It was sturdy aluminum. Perfect for the outer bumpers that went all the way around the outside. The contact switches were messy and it was always making contact with ghosts.
More memories from Servo Mag.
Here is a picture of the interior structure with the KIM-1 on top.
I wish I had a picture of mine. I'm sure there is one somewhere at my parents house.
Welcome!
Welcome to Robots D11. I am a robots enthusiast and I hope you enjoy what you find here. Please join me on my quest to build and collect the best robots around.