At the beginning of July Arduino was in London to participate to Hack The Hackathon event. We had a great time and a lot of enthusiasm about Arduino: at least 60 hands went in the air when Russ Klein, from HTH,  asked on Friday night who had never seen Arduino. And by the end of the weekend, 5 projects were developed using the technology and 26 people emerged with hands-on experience. Here’s a summary of the projects and some pictures:

MEDITEL
Katie Bibbard, Edwin Senjobe, Duncan McKenzie, and Julian Carstairs created a method for rural healthcare workers in Africa to monitor and report a patient’s vital signs, diagnose the patient’s condition, and take appropriate action. A portal allows the readings to be communicated to experts in other locations who provide advice and guidance. Arduino and GSM Shield were used to collect physical data and upload via USSD or SMS but also program reminders to deliver medicines. This is their presentation on Prezi.

ICE BUDDY – AID CONVOY
Hoi Lam created a local communications system to be used when there is a report of disaster. The system sends the coordinates to users of local team within a specified radius then asks, “are u ok?” Arduino makes the system easy to use for small teams of people (for example a United Nations Convoy) which may not be able to communicate with the outside world but which can communicate locally among team members. Arduino provides visible cues to help rescue and reconnaissance workers coordinate efforts.

PEPITA
Alex Gonzalez, Carlos Miguel, and Gianfranco Cecconoi created an inexpensive device that functions as a remote control unit to help elderly and learning disabled people access basic communications functions without having to learn a complex system of menus and other user interface options. Arduino is the controller giving support technicians a reduced set of possible issues, fewer distracting features, and fewer ways that the end user can get lost or confused.

SAFE @ HOME
Matthias Buchting created a way to detect critical injury at home. Elderly or infirmed people living on their own sometimes suffer catastrophic injury and cannot call for help. Using Arduino and sensors such as temperature for fire, sensors at the door to see if a person is walking in apartment, motion and sound to detect the absence of movement, abnormal readings can be sent as notifications to healthcare or emergency response personnel.

SMARTWELL
The team composed by Omkar Vadpathak, Munya Mutikani, Thura Z Maung, and Javier Madrigal worked on a project that tests well water in rural areas of India and Africa. Water wells are far apart and regular testing is difficult or impossible in many areas.
Before going to the well, user can send an SMS to request info and the well answers back delivering some environmental parameters and, most importantly, if there is water and if it’s drinking water. Arduino is able to measures the temperature, water level, toxicity, oxygen content, and other vital readings to determine whether the water is safe to drink. All the wells are sending info to authorities allowing them to monitor the level of pollution and understand if reclamation is needed.

HAPPY CYCLE
Javier Madrigal created a sensor-based safety system for use by bicyclists. Using proximity and other sensors, a cyclist is alerted of approaching vehicles and other obstacles. Arduino acts as the data collection device and communicates with the cyclist’s phone or other audio or visual warning system. The system focuses on blind spots, darkness, and other cycling hazards.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, July 29th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Hackathon.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Catarina Mota and I put together an updated version of the annual Open Source Hardware Community Survey for the Open-Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). Here’s a summary:

Our goal is to arrive at a better understanding of who we are as a community, why and how we use/make open-source hardware, and how our practices and numbers are changing over time. For this purpose, we are asking all those who use and/or develop open-source hardware to please respond. The aggregate results will be made publicly available after the survey closes. By publishing your responses, we hope to provide the public with insights into the practices and experiences of the people involved in open-source hardware.

Please help us understand the open-source hardware community by taking the survey.

You can also check out last year’s results.

This entry was postedby mellis on Monday, July 29th, 2013 and is filed under Community, Open Source.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Last year to celebrate the launch of the new Arduino Starter Kit,  RS Components in collaboration with Arduino,  produced  10 video tutorials featuring Massimo Banzi showing how to create cool projects with the redesigned release of the Kit and all its components.
 

Today RS Components announced on their Twitter and Google+ that the Arduino video tutorials are now marked with a Creative Commons license, that means that you can remix and reuse them as you like.

We created a Playlist on Arduino official Channel and soon we’ll add also German and French subtitles.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, StarterKit, Tutorial, tutorials.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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On the 11th of August a team composed by researchers from FabLab Pisa and University of Pisa’s Center for Bioengineering and Robotics “E.Piaggio” will start a great adventure with a Summer School on the project called OS4BME (Open Source for Biomedical Engineering).

The aim of the project is to bring the DIY&Makers approach in the developing of simple, low cost/high impact biomedical devices, precisely, in this particular case, a neonatal Baby Monitor.

The course will take place at Kenyatta University (Nairobi) and it will involve setting up a 3D printing system, developing a neonatal monitoring device, using open source, electronics based on the Arduino platform and powered by solar panels.

Participants will play an active role in the identification of components, design, assembling and testing of the device and in the discussion of regulatory issues in its development. Close attention will also be paid to safety, ergonomic aspects and regulatory  standards for biomedical devices.

The medical device industry in Africa is largely absent and there is an over reliance on foreign companies to repair and design biomedical instrumentation and resolve technical problems … More importantly, at present there are no specific engines or platforms focused on the sharing of biomedical instrumentation and devices. This is because, by their very nature, biomedical devices possess stringent performance requirements to comply with regulatory standards to ensure patient safety.

OS4BME is a project created by Prof. Arti Ahluwalia (Univ. Pisa), Daniele Mazzei and Carmelo De Maria (both from Fablab Pisa but also post-doc researchers at Centro E.Piaggio). The summer school is an initiative organized by a consortium of nine African universities with the objective of creating a sustainable health-care system, developing a network of academic excellence for Biomedical Engineering in Africa with the support of the ‘United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

 Arduino is supporting the project and  we sent to the team a bunch of Arduino UNO boards, Wi-Fi and GSM Shields to be used during the course and then will be donated to the Kenyatta University and Fablab Nairobi.

In the next week  we’ll keep in touch with the team and receive updates directly from the summer school. Stay Tuned on this blog and on the work in progress of their WIKI!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, arduino.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Shantal Der Boghosian is the owner and cake decorator of Shakar Bakery, but also an engineer and a chemist based in Los Angeles California. She recently wrote us to share her 5ft (152cm) tall tribute cake for Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo, and created together with her sister and Garen (coder).

The cool thing about this project is that the bodies of the band are made of cake and the heads move at the rhythm of the track “Get Lucky”, controlled by Arduino Mega.

This project took 2 months to design, over 100 hours to build the structure and another 100 hours spent on the electronics, programming, and mechanics . We had a lot of bumps in the road and we worked through every single one. This was the first time I ever built a cake structure, the first time I sculpted with rice krispies, and the first time I built a cake on such a massive scale! This was Garen’s first time coding an Arduino servo, and creating head motions that defied weight restraints! I have to admit that we did a last minute surgery to the silver helmet to make the “no” motion more fluid.

Enjoy the video below and take a look at her detailed blogpost with all the phases of the complex yummy construction!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, July 25th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Mega.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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The power of infrared light was widely and best appreciated with invention of television’s remote controls. The signal between a remote control handset and the device it controls, consists of pulses of infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye.

Tomorrow at MakerFaire Dublin you’ll we able to see the work of AnalysIR, a project that is taking this technology to a whole new level.

They implemented a Windows application which connects to an Arduino with the addition of an IR receiver and can decode new IR signals in a fraction of the time: no need for expensive Logic Analyzers or Oscilloscopes.

Here they are with their Indiegogo campaign:

At MakerFaire they will be showing some cool demos of what you can do with IR like generating electricity, seeing the invisible -Using iPhone & Android camera to check if TV remote is working, long range TV remote Control Demo Using Optics and many more applications for a total of 10 installations. Look out for them on Saturday!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Friday, July 26th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, MakerFaire.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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( Originally published in Make)
In early July we spent a couple of days going through all of the submissions received to participate in Maker Faire Rome — the European Edition, taking place Oct. 3-6 in Italy. It was a great experience for us to discover makers’ projects from all around Europe, and the MakerTour gave us the chance to meet some of them and to produce 69 video clips to share this experience with all of you. You can watch the videos on the Maker Faire Rome channel on YouTube. Among those is a video of a visit to the Arduino factory in Ivrea.

On the blog we said thank you 320 times to everyone who submitted her or his ideas to Maker Faire Rome, and we published a map showing a total of 200 Italian projects and 120 from other countries participating in the Call for Makers, which ended on June 30.

To give you an idea of the diversity of projects we received, I chose three from Italy, France, and Spain.

BitCave is a project focused on local and homemade cheese production created by Guido Cortese, a technician based in Italy who likes bees and plein air. After self-producing beer and bread, it’s now possible to experiment with cheese making. If you don’t have a cellar or basement to age cheese, you can reproduce the optimal conditions to let raw cheese ripen by adjusting seasonal parameters with the help of Arduino. The parameters of temperature and humidity are governed by ripenINO, the brain of BitCave. The airflow is constantly cooled and humidified through the cell, and is corrected in case of microclimatic variations depending on the program you choose.

Shhh. Cheese sleeping inside.

FabSkate is a project designed as a proof of concept for digital manufacturing and developed by Luciano Betoldi with Fablab Barcelona team, in Spain. Their goal was to develop a system that delivers fully customized, high quality skateboards and longboards for the price of an off-the-shelf model. Initially trained as a product designer, Luciano became interested in digital manufacturing techniques while designing, developing, and prototyping high-end furniture for large European manufacturers. He quickly changed direction as he realized how these techniques would soon become the manufacturing process itself, and he focused on learning as much as he could about it, working closely with the Barcelona FabLab for the last five years.

An early FabSkate design.

Bionico Hand is an open source, affordable 3D printed robot hand adaptable for upper limb amputees with muscular interface. Nicolas Huchet started the project for himself, working together with the team of Labfab, a fablab in Rennes, France. Now the project is getting bigger as the team is collaborating with people around the world, especially from Brazil and the U.S. They also work in synergy with Gael Langevin, the creator of the incredible Inmoov Robot, which is coming to Maker Faire Rome as well!

You can watch a cool video interview of both below.

It’s going to be a great Maker Faire, full of surprises, and engaging activities. Are you coming to Italy?

This entry was postedby Massimo Banzi on Monday, July 22nd, 2013 and is filed under MakerFaire.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Patrick Griffin is a  maintenance technician working in the plastics industry for the last 20+ years with primary focus being the repair, upkeep, & design of electrical, electronic, automation, and both relay & PLC control logic. He submitted his project to Arduino blog about using Teensy Arduino on a Maac vacuum former:

This story revolves around one of the workhorse machines in the company where I work: a Maac vacuum former. It is a solid, well-designed machine with a solid, well-designed control system that Maac contracted out to the Electro Cam systems group. As with any industrial equipment, as time goes by the OEM develops new products that replace their old stuff, technologies advance, and eventually they start the formal process of obsoleting their older inventory.
The situation started out years ago, long before I arrived on the scene, when the company I work for hired a contractor to add some automation to the Maac. When the automation was added almost all of the Electro Cam system was necessarily replaced with an Allen-Bradley SLC500 PLC to provide the changes in logic & the additional I/O points to do all of the new functions. The only Electro Cam components left in the Maac are the parts in the 84 zone oven controller.

We have been aware that more and more of it’s components, especially the Electro Cam controls, were being obsoleted. Recently we were put in the position to ask ourselves what our options are when one of these proprietary controls have a permanent catastrophic failure. What we learned was that we would be given few options through the official channels. We would have to leave the machine down and idle for an undetermined amount of time while the failed component was sent to Electro Cam for assessment and possible repair. This would certainly take longer than a week, but my gut says it would be closer to a month. There are also no guarantees that the part could be repaired at all. We were quoted a price for a replacement as starting at $4500, but with no promises.

Not having a replacement for a proprietary single-sourced part on the shelf is scary. Worse is when that single source says that they really can’t help you. This is one of several (maybe many) triggers for the maintenance department that I am a part of to fly wildly into a re-engineering frenzy.

Read the complete story and take a look at the schematics, on his website.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Friday, July 19th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Prototyping, Schematics.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Inspired by the work of Munari, Montessori and her mum, Antonella Nonnis followed her personal interest in building tangible interactions and working children in general and recently  built an unusual diy pop-up book.

The Music, Math, Art and Science Electronic Book contains 4 pages that treat those subjects using movable parts and use a pull tab, a button and the electrical capacitance of the human body to activate sounds and lights:

The pages have been done using recycled materials that I collected during these years in London (paper, fabrics, LEDs, resistors, wires, foil paper, glue, cardboards) and it’s powered by two Arduino Diecimila, one that controls the paper Pop-up Piano and the other is for controlling the Arts and Science Page, while the Math page runs autonomously with 2 3V cell batteries. The two Arduino run with two 9V batteries although they are more stable if they run with the USB through the computer.

The book was completed after the successful experimental page containing an electronic pop-up piano, Antonella gave as a birthday present to her 6-year-old niece Matilde.

Take a look at more pics visiting Antonella’s project  page.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, July 17th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, music.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Kerimil, user on Arduino Forum, submitted us his  project which focuses on establishing communication between an Arduino board and an android mobile using bluetooth:

The idea is to gain access to hardware on Android devices (accelerometers, gyro, wifi connectivity, gps, GPRS, touchscreen, text to speech and speech to text) and/or use it to relay data to the internet. MIT’s app inventor was used to write a custom app in this example. The code can be easily modified to create your own apps.

You can watch his video below and read the complete tutorial on this page.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, July 18th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Tutorial.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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The work of Afroditi Psarra includes experimentation with embroidery, soft circuit and diy electronics. I got in touch with her after discovering she was holding a workshop in Barcelona around sound performances using Lilypad Arduino along with a really cool embroidered synthesizer (…and also submitting her project to Maker Faire Rome !).

Even if her background is in fine arts, as a little girl she got interested in creative ways of expression: on one side she was lucky enough to have all sorts of after-school activities that included painting, theater games and learning but also how to program using LOGO and QBasic. That was in the days of black-and-white terminals and MS-DOS commands:

I still remember the excitement of not knowing what to expect at the opposite side of the screen. So for me, technology has always been a major part of my life.

Below you can find my questions to her:

Zoe Romano: In which way you started mixing art, technology and craft?
Afroditi Psarra: I had the chance to spend a year in Madrid as an ERASMUS student and there I encountered the work that was done at the Medialab Padro and had my first physical media art experience at the  ”The making of Balkan Wars: The Game” exhibition.  Two years later I went back to Madrid to do a post-graduate course on Image, Technology and Design and there I got familiar with Processing. I started working on interactive applets, but after some time I felt like I was missing the manual, hands-on labour of creating, so while I was coding I was also working on simple embroideries oriented around women and technology. These embroidery skills were passed on to me by my grandmother who taught me everything about knitting.

How did you get to know Arduino?
At the various media art workshops that I attended at the Medialab-Prado I was always hearing about Arduino, but for me electronics was something totally unknown and was always connected to robotics and automation processes. About two years ago a friend and very talented media-artist, Maria Varela, who was studying in London told me that she had attended a LilyPad Arduino workshop and that this was an Arduino implementation designed to be used with conductive threads instead of wires.

I was really excited by the idea that this would allow me to combine my work in embroidery with coding, so I bought myself a kit and started to experiment with some basic examples and tutorials I found in Instructables and started to follow the work of Hannah Perner-Wilson (Plusea, Kobakant), Lynne Bruning and Becky Stern. At the time I was still living in Madrid so me and another girl from Medialab, Francesca Mereu, formed a small group called SmartcraftLab and posted our experiments on-line.

I remember that one of my first experiments was using the conductive thread as a pressure sensor that created tones, and when I heard that primitive digital sound I instantly felt that it was something that I wished to explore further. I think that this interest in physical computing, e-textiles and sound brought all of the things that I was working on earlier together, and the Arduino allowed me to do that.

As for the production of my projects, it is always done by me, but often look to the Arduino community for solutions to problems that I may encounter and ask for other people’s help on hardware and software issues. I do not see myself as a very skilled programmer just yet, but I certainly am evolving. After all, I believe that workshops, hands-on experience and collaborations with other people are the things that allow you to grow as a Maker.

A couple of years ago Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, said “The two most important introductions for art in the past 20 years have been the Arduino and Processing”, how do you see it?

I totally agree with the quote. Processing and Arduino are the two things that have allowed artists with no previous background in computing and electronics work with tools that where only available to specialists before. These two languages have created a tendency towards interactive art and we are now experiencing a revolution in DIY digital fabrication, hacking and tinkering on so many different levels. I think that the increasing spread of Medialabs, Hackerspaces and Fab labs around the world is the living proof of that.

In which ways are you experimenting with the Lilypad?
The LilyPad has allowed me to explore the relation between crafts connected with women’s labour such as knitting, sewing and embroidery, with electronics and creative coding, as well as the creation of soft interfaces of control. In my project Lilytronica I am currently using the LilyPad to create my own embroidered synthesizers that I use to perform live.

Considering that the LilyPad is not designed for creating sound, and you only have digital outputs and 8 MHz clock speed, the result is a very rough, primitive sound quality, which I personally like a lot. In my interactive performance Idoru() I am exploring the body as an interface of control of sound though the use of wearables. In this project the LilyPad acts as a controller, and the sound is produced in SuperCollider.

I am also participating in conferences around open source technologies and organizing workshops on e-textiles and the use of the LilyPad, because I want to transmit my passion and because I want to get more people involved in this exciting new artistic field.

Are you releasing your work in open source?
Ever since I started to work with the Arduino I try to publish my work on-line so that I can have feedback on everything and until now I have been releasing the code on my personal website, but I am thinking of creating a Github account and releasing the code there so that everything is easily accessed by anyone interested. I firmly believe in releasing one’s work in open source, because this way you can evolve your work more rapidly and share your creation process with other like-minded individuals.

Where do you see wearable computing most interesting developments going towards?
I think it is a bit early to tell. Technology evolves at a very fast pace and multinationals sometimes reject certain developments because of their lack of economic interest. Seeing all the fuss around the Google glasses, one would argue that wearable computing is heading to connect the physical body with the Internet of Things. I personally feel that we can certainly expect developments around wearables and locative media and various medical applications.

For now, the most interesting applications in wearables are around fashion, art and music, and they require a certain craftsmanship to be made. As Kobakant argue in their paper ”Future Master Craftsmanship: where we want electronic textile crafts to go“  we never know what can happen when industrial automation kicks in. When our skills become devalued because machines can produce work faster, cheaper and better, we will still enjoy the craft process. But instead of sitting back to become E-Textile grandmothers, perhaps competition from the automated machines will encourage us to move on.

Pictures courtesy of Afroditi Psarra

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, July 15th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Interview, Lilypad, MakerFaire, Processing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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As many of you know and Wikipedia clearly explains:

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.

Youtube user Remco Veldkamp published a video about his DIY project on this pattern using Arduino. You can watch it below.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Tuesday, July 16th, 2013 and is filed under arduino.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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When we came up with Arduino, one of the things we decided very early on was that we wanted to release the hardware design files so that people could make their own versions or just make an exact copy if they couldn’t find boards where they lived.
I think we contributed to popularize the concept of open source hardware and we can see it from the huge amount of variations of Arduino-compatible devices being released every day.

After the platform started to become popular we had the issue of figuring out a business model to sustain our work and keep innovating the project. But we also realized we needed a way for people to be guaranteed that

• they were buying a quality product that would replace any defective item, should problems arise
• they were contributing to a community that would bring forward  open-source values and knowledge sharing

We decided that the best way was to register the trademark of the Arduino lettering and to create a logo that would make it easier to identify products sanctioned by us.

A few years later the situation is clearly complex with so many companies identifying something as an Arduino even if the only thing they have in common with us is the board pinout. It’s time we clarify what in our mind is an Arduino, what are the different variations of Arduino around and how they relate to our project.

We classified them as Clones, Derivatives, Compatibles and Counterfeits. But let’s start with explaining what is an official board.

- Official Boards
An Arduino is a board which

• it’s directly supported by the official Arduino IDE
• it follows the Arduino layout we have standardised
• it’s properly documented on our website
• it’s properly licensed to bear the Arduino name and logo
• it’s made by authorized manufacturers

The authorized manufacturers pay a small royalty to Arduino to keep the project going (pay for the servers, the people who develop the software, design the hardware, write documentation and provide support, etc.). We sign contracts with them and all the authorised distributors that make sure they will replace any defective board should the customer receive a product they feel is not working properly.

Although the percentage is incredibly small (less than 1%) it’s still important to know that somebody will take care of any issue. Through this system we have enabled people to have access to cheap hardware that is properly supported and the community can build upon.
These are the only boards that can legitimately use the Arduino name.

Current official manufacturers are SmartProjects in Italy, Sparkfun in the USA and DogHunter in Taiwan/China. These are the only manufacturers that are allowed to use the Arduino logo on their boards,

- Clones
A market developed for products we call Clones which are exact (or almost exact) replicas of Arduino boards with a different branding , i.e. they are usually named with some variation of Ardu-something or something-duino. These products are released according to trademark laws (unless they copy almost exactly our graphics which is not open-source) and have a place in the market.

Customers who want to support the Arduino project should be aware that these products do not give back anything financially and very rarely in term of help on software or documentation.

- Derivatives
A more interesting segment for us is what we call Derivatives. These are products that are derived from the Arduino hardware design but they innovate either by providing a different layout and features often to better serve a specific market. These are the products that have also helped Arduino become so ubiquitous.

There are many examples but I will mention only a couple:

• Teensy by PJRC – Paul has contributed a lot of code, bug reports, pull requests and to the discourse in general.
• Flora by Adafruit – Limor has contributed over 100 libraries and countless tutorials about Arduino becoming one of the most important members of the Arduino ecosystem.

- Arduino-compatibles
There is also a hazy cloud of products that call themselves “Arduino-compatible” but their actual compatibility is sometimes really marginal.
We go from products that have a semi-compatible port of the Arduino API but use very different processors, to boards that call themselves an “Arduino” just because they have a couple of connectors mechanically compatible with Arduino.

This, for example, is very common on Kickstarter where a number of projects try to get traction by using (sometimes obsessively) the Arduino keyword throughout the project description. Normally we’re pretty relaxed about these unless they are really shameless, then we email them and sometimes they realize they have gone too far.

- Counterfeits
Finally there is a category of products that are really detrimental to the whole open-source hardware movement, we call these “counterfeits”.

These are boards that clone the official board including the Arduino branding (logo and board graphics). Since the Arduino graphics is trademarked and we don’t release any of the files, whoever uses our graphics and logo makes a deliberate act of Trademark infringement. These products not only trick people into thinking they are buying an official Arduino (therefore supporting the Arduino project) but they also provide no support. We’ve had many reports of people buying these products and finding out they are damaged but unfortunately for them the manufacturer is nowhere to be found to provide a replacement.

The most common place where counterfeits can be found is usually on auction sites. Special mention is needed for Amazon.com because of the way the website works: they pool together all the suppliers of a certain product. When the customer buys an Arduino they might get a counterfeit depending from which stock they used. From our side it’s hard to stop them because if we report a counterfeit Arduino on their platform, they will “kick out” all the suppliers including the legitimate ones. We’re still trying to find ways to communicate with Amazon but it’s not easy.

In any case you can read this page explaining how to spot a counterfeit  Arduino.

- We love open-source
We believe firmly in open source hardware and we have always systematically released any hardware design and the software needed to reproduce our products. We think this advances the whole community and provides a platform for shared innovation where the advantages are more than the drawbacks, but we also think that Trademark violations are like identity theft: the same way each one of us wants to have the right to own their name we believe we have the right to decide whoever gets to be called Arduino, everything else is right there on Github for anybody to build upon.

This entry was postedby Massimo Banzi on Wednesday, July 10th, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, arduino, Hardware.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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My Air, My Health was the title of a Challenge calling innovators to work on a wearable project integrating air-quality measurement with heart rate and breathing.

The promoters of the challenge, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Services (NIH), launched it because they think that the possibility of understanding the relations between air pollution and people’s health in real-time could have an important impact in preventing disease and illness in the population. In the description you can read:

The required system design must be capable of linking air pollutant concentrations with physiological data, providing geocoded and time-stamped files in an easy to use format, and transmitting this data via existing networks to a central data repository. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this challenge, solvers are highly encouraged to form teams drawing on multiple relevant expertise…

At the beginning of June they finally announced the winner of the prize of $100.000, it’s called Conscious Clothing and is a project developed by David Kuller, Gabrielle Savage Dockterman, and Dot Kelly.

The team created a system around self data-tracking, specifically calculating particulate matter inhaled and collecting basic health data,  transmitting them real-time to any Bluetooth-enabled device and allow their visualization in different format.  The prototype was made using Arduino Lilypad connected to a particulate matter air sensor that hangs near the neck and a series of stretchy strips of silver-knitted yarn wrapping around the chest to measure breathing.

We had a chat with David (in the pictures), who developed both hardware and software, and asked him what was, in his opinion the feature which made them win: ” I think that Conscious Clothing was the project that was most comfortable, truly wearable and also affordable, compared to the others”.

You can watch  the video below to see the prototype in action!

Photo Courtesy of Angel Devil Productions, Inc. and Conscious ClothingTM

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, July 11th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Competition(s), Enviroment, LilyPad, Lilypad, Wearable Computing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Annikken Andee is a Bluetooth Arduino shield, currently on an Indiegogo campaign, that let  Arduino communicate with  Android device without writing Android code.

With the growing popularity of smart phones in this time and era it’s interesting to explore how Arduino could tap on the strength of smart phones – touch screen capability and smart phone capability. However for the integration to work, one has to develop the corresponding Smart phone app to handle the bluetooth communication and provide a stable GUI on the screen.

Therefore to make things easier for Arduino developers who wish to tap on the power on smartphone, the Singapore-based team came up Annikken Andee project, an Arduino shield, with supporting resources, that performs primarily the following actions:

• handles the communication between Android and Arduino
• GUI creation on smartphone by coding on Arduino. Requires no Smartphone App programming
• accesses to Smartphone functions from Arduino Library
• provides larger, portable and non-volatile storage

The shield communicates with Arduino via the ICSP header (SPI) and pin 8. An SD card Reader is available for external data storage for Arduino –  for huge data storage or extended period of data logging activity by Arduino. As Android has yet to support for Bluetooth 4.0/BLE, they are using bluetooth 2.1 module WT11i by Bluegiga for communicating with the Android phone. Currently the shield supports Arduino Uno, Mega and Leonardo.

Robin, part of the Team Annikken Ande, wrote us:

With Andee, Arduino user can program the UI on their Android phone by downloading the Andee Arduino Library onto their Arduino IDE and the Andee Android App into their Android phone from google play store. Using the functions in the Arduino library, user can easily design the UI on the Andee Android App without touching Android programming.

As we hope to spread the news of this invention to as many people as possible, we believe that arduino.cc is the perfect place to help us make this work.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Tuesday, July 9th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Leonardo, Mega, shield.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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It’s been a while now we have been testing and bringing ArduinoTour Workshops all over Italy and – here and there – around Europe. And we are happy to inform you that this powerful workshop format is soon landing in Singapore on August the 3rd-4th, hosted by The Hub Singapore, a cool co-working space willing to spread the Arduino word within its walls and beyond.

During the 2-day workshop participants will learn the basics of Arduino (what we call the Arduino Alphabet) and  have the chance to see it in action on different scenarios. They will produce their own project using the Arduino Starter Kit given to the workshop attendees.

The ArduinoTour is a way to meet & share experiences. For this reason it’s traditionally opened by a public presentation of Arduino which is going to happen on friday the 2nd of August at 7:00 PM at the-Hub. (download hi-res flyer)

Book your participation now and join the Arduino world.

This entry was postedby Davide Gomba on Monday, July 8th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, events, workshops.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Most of the projects we’ve been featuring on this blog are  happen to be focused on diy approaches around music, design, art. We are  noticing that more and more people are starting to realize the benefits of using Arduino also in  industrial settings.

Today I’m going to highlight a project posted by Paul M Furley on his blog and describing how back in 2009 he worked in a  family firm, producing the user operator software for their new digital printing machine and decided to use Arduino in high-tech manufacturing:

 I’d been hacking around with Arduino since my masters project and it came along at a perfect time for JF Machines. They had just developed their new ink circulation system: a serious affair with 5 separate ink bottles rising and falling to alter  pressure along with precise temperature control. They needed a way to drive the bottle lifting motors, read in alarm signals and switch inputs as well as output various flashing sequences for the benefit of the operator. Although a PLC would have been suitable, Arduino seemed like a great option.

Since then he realized why he made the right choice  and lists a number of the reasons useful to explore.

You can read the complete story on  his page, here’s just a couple of the most interesting benefits:

Supply security – even if Arduino stopped supplying boards tomorrow, other manufacturers are making clones, and the hardware design lives on. If Arduino changed their physical design, it wouldn’t be much trouble to make a converter to adapt the new and old sockets – in fact, someone would probably release it was an off-the-shelf project as soon as the announcement was made! In the worst case scenario, JF Machines could manufacture the whole Arduino board from the designs for as long as the a compatible microcontroller remained available.

Low cost – I often hear the opposite argument when discussing Arduino with the hobby and hacker scene. I agree that for integrating into a consumer product, the Arduino’s off-the-shelf price is fairly expensive (although good luck designing and making a small batch yourself for cheaper…). However when integrated in a five-figure industrial printing machine, the cost comes close to zero, especially when considering the PLC alternative and the support benefits. If JF Machines were ever to mass-produce their machines, reducing the price of the Arduino would be fairly low on the list of priorities!

If you have a similar story and want to share it, we’d be happy to feature it on the blog,  just submit it on this page.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, July 4th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Open Source.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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picture by Joi Ito

Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, creator of Chumby and NeTV, gave an interesting interview about Maker Movement and Maker economy to the chinese “Programmer Magazine” or CSDN.net.

The Maker movement, I think, is less about developing products, and more about developing people. It’s about helping people realize that technology is something man-made, and because of this, every person has the power to control it: it just takes some knowledge. There is no magic in technology. Another way to look at it is, we can all be magicians with a little training.

as a matter of fact, Bunnie will talk about this and more other related  stuff at the Singapore Mini Maker Faire on Saturday the 27th of July (enroll) (thanks to William Hooi for sharing)

via [Bunniestudios]

This entry was postedby Davide Gomba on Friday, July 5th, 2013 and is filed under Interview.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Mike Cook prototyped  a diy physical music sequencer  with an Arduino Uno and we agree with him it has a ”unique take on the concept an RFID sequencer”.

He wrote us describing it with these words:

This takes RFID tags each one mapped to a note and instrument and placed on one of 32 pegs will generate a music sequence. I designed and built a special RFID reader that has 32 read positions, it took 3 months to wire up. The case was hand built and it was designed to fit exactly into a flight box. It contains an Arduino and outputs MIDI.

It uses 32 red / blue LEDs to illuminate acrylic pegs which light up red when a token is hung on them. The sequence sweep progress is shown in blue on the pegs when the sweep position meets a peg with a token it light up purple and a note is produced. The sequence length can be adjusted from 8 steps to over a million steps before repeating.

You can browse his well-documented page with software and schematic at this link.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013 and is filed under arduino, MIDI, music.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Some days ago Makertour was in Torino to join the Arduino Camp organized by Officine Arduino and hosted by  Fablab Torino. Enrico Bassi, president of the Fablab, was interviewed by Makerfaire Rome crew around his experience in the “maker movement” and in the creation of the first  fablab in the city.

During the same trip the video-crew visited the factory where Arduino is manufactured and Davide Gomba reveals where does the “Arduino” name comes from! Watch it now:

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, July 1st, 2013 and is filed under Hackathon, Interview, MakerFaire.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Since last February our Arduino page on Facebook has been growing fast and today  we’re celebrating 100.000 fans: if you have an account on it, we invite you to join us and our passionate community on Facebook!

United States, India and Italy are the countries giving more “likes” to the page, but we receive videos, pictures and inquires from all over the world.

From now on we’ll be regularly posting on this blog  updates and cool projects  shared by people on our social channels.

Just to give you an idea of what comes up, here’s three  great videos posted by our fans on the Arduino page:

• Trashcan with PET detector

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, Community, Facebook, Social Media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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