Make Magazine published a short report of the panel taking place at the Hardware Innovation Workshop, yesterday in New York City. Massimo Banzi and Jason Kridner, co-founder of BeagleBoard, were on the stage talking about the evolution of microcontrollers:

Makers love to develop on their favorite microcontrollers. The creators behind two of the most popular took boards the stage at the New York Hardware Innovation Workshop (HIW) in a panel moderated by MAKE’s own Matt Richardson. Although makers might like to argue about which is the best platform, there was plenty of common ground for these two panelists.

Massimo Banzi, Co-Founder of the Arduino Project, began the session with a short discussion on how and why Arduino got started.

“Every time you design a system to do everything, you end up with a system designed to do nothing,” Massimo says. “The challenge is to build a platform that solves a simple problem for a specific group of people: beginners for example.”

Keep reading  the article on Make.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, September 19th, 2013 and is filed under events, 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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Some months ago we announced that we were developing a new product to meet the growing demand for wi-fi, linux based boards. The blogpost on the upcoming Arduino YÚN was our most read ever, and since then the attention has stayed high.

Recently, some of you have been asking why the YÚN hasn’t come out yet and why the Arduino Robot is not yet available for purchase.

Simply put, moving to a wifi-enabled linux board is a whole new step for Arduino and it’s taking longer than we expected. Arduino YÚN  is our most complex product ever and we decided to working on getting it right regardless of timing.

The early prototypes boards mounted 8MB of Flash and 32MB of RAM. While we managed to implement most of the YÚN features previously planned inside this amount of memory, we were forced to use optimized versions of the most common software packages: smaller in size but missing a lot of cool features available in the “full” non-optimized version.

We also quickly discovered that there wasn’t plenty of free space remaining for the user to install additional packages or to run complex programs without incurring in stability problems.

Considering this we finally decided to double both Flash and RAM, giving a comfortable 16MB of Flash and 64MB of RAM.

We try our best to get everything done as soon as possible while still providing the quality that we hope distinguishes Arduino products.

The delay in the Arduino Robot is connected to that of YÚN and our distribution processes.

We are really happy about the new Arduino YÚN and we hope the community will be as well.

The board is going to be available on the Arduino Store from September the 10th, while being delivered to our distributors late this month. In the video below you can watch a  preview of the board with me and David Cuartielles giving some more details about it.

From the product pages on the Arduino Store,  for the YÚN and Robot, you can activate an alert that will send you an email when the product is available from the distributors.

This entry was postedby Massimo Banzi on Wednesday, August 21st, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, arduino, Yún.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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Some days ago David Watts posted an unexpected but very welcome video on Arduino G+ Community, a poem dedicated to the Arduino community itself and commenting with these words:

Sort of a thank you to all the people who helped me learn about electronics and specifically Arduino. I really enjoy making projects and sharing them I and many other people would not be able to do it without such a fantastic community.

Here’s the video of the poem:

This nice contribution gives us the chance to finally announce  that next to our official Arduino Page on G+, with more than 212.000 [+1] and  almost 120.000 people adding us in their circles, now we have an official Arduino G+ Community you can join.

 Thanks to the collaboration of  Gary Rudd and Heath Naylor,  who created a passionate and active  unofficial community and accepted the proposal to make it official, recently we’ve just  updated the logo and joined them in the moderation. If you are on G+ we invite you to take part with your  enthusiasm and projects!

This is one of the channels you can choose to be active on Arduino online community, in the following days I’m going to bring some highlights from our  Facebook page aswell!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Community, inspiration, 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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Coderdojo is a global collaboration providing free and open learning to young people, especially in programming technology. Last weekend David Cuartielles from the Arduino team went to Slane Castle in Ireland  to make a brief presentation to the CoderDojo conference about the Castilla project and how we are hacking Secondary School education in Spain.

Here’s the blurb:

During the Spring term 2013, Arduino Verkstad, is working in analyzing how to bring open hardware and software as a way to transform education at secondary schools in the region of Castilla La Mancha, Spain. This talk will describe the way content is being created and validated in an experiment involving 24 schools, 30 teachers, over 500 kids, and a 6-members design team. There are many similarities between the ecosystem at a classroom and the one to be found at a typical CoderDojo group. The author will draw parallels and explain how the content generated for the above mentioned experiment can be applied to mentor in learning about electronics in one-to-one educational scenarios.

The room was packed and they had quite some fun listening to the stories from Dojos all around the world where kids are learning about technology supported by mentors. Specially touching was the presentation about Black Girls Code who started just a year ago with a series of summer camp sessions for over 650 kids across the US. Check the video below to know more about it:

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, April 15th, 2013 and is filed under conference, Education, events.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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