Combating COVID-19 Conference: A Collaborative Arduino Community Initiative 
to take place on April 2nd at 5pm CET

Humanity is facing one of the most trying events in its history and as technologists, makers and designers we are asking ourselves how can we help. 

How can we contribute to the efforts to save lives, to help our fellow human beings?

All of us have been thinking about this and observing what was going on in the world.

We have seen communities, including the Arduino community, trying to design devices that would help hospitals cope with the lack of equipment; we’ve seen people firing up their imagination and their 3d printers in an effort to build something that could save even a single human life.

Having noticed that a large number of these efforts are using Arduino technology we reached out to a number of these communities to offer our help, donate some hardware, provide engineering support and do whatever we can considering that we are a small company.

One thing that was striking to us is the large amount of duplication in the work people are doing – many people are spending valuable time trying to overcome similar challenges in their design, rather than sharing their solution to the benefit of all and moving on to the next hurdle. Also that there are different teams with different strengths and skill sets that would be better working together than apart.

We must do better, be more effective, work together and merge efforts to solve these problems and reach our common goal quicker and more efficiently.

Because of all of this we want to invite as many of these projects as possible to an online gathering, to get people talking, to offer help on how to design and make hardware, how to think about the software, and how to scale manufacturing (we would like to share our knowledge in making tens of thousands of open source boards per week). Finally and most importantly we must take guidance from  medical professionals so that they can steer requirements and validate the designs so our efforts have the most positive impact. 

Join us online on April, 2nd to understand how we can work together to do better together, and Together – Let’s Make Covid-19 History

David Cuartielles, Massimo Banzi co-founders of Arduino (on behalf of Arduino)

Combating COVID-19 Conference: A Collaborative Arduino Community Initiative
will take place on April 2nd at 17.00 CET.

This is an open invitation to anyone currently using Arduino compatible devices within a project to design and manufacture ventilators, respirators or other devices to combat COVID-19. Be you a doctor, an academic, a professional company/researcher or an innovator you are more than welcome to join the conference. 

The conference will be hosted in Zoom (link available soon), with the ability to interact with Arduino and other members on the conference via Discord (free download here). 

There are different ways to participate in the conference; you can present your Arduino based project to combat COVID-19, support other community projects or provide expert advice – we are all stronger together.

(N.B. if you want to present and share your project, please complete this form by 12.00 (noon) CET on April 2nd)

More information on the conference will be available soon, in the meantime you can learn more about Arduino’s overall response to COVID-19 emergency here.

For the latest update regarding Arduino’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak please click here.

Priority Service for the Design & Production of Essential Medical and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

As companies around the globe rapidly react to governments’ calls to produce critical medical equipment like ventilators and PPE, Arduino is prioritizing stock allocation for these urgent needs.

If your company urgently requires any Arduino hardware or software to facilitate the prototyping and production of any equipment or solution to lessen the impact of Covid-19 please contact us.

A dedicated team will work to ensure we support your needs through ensuring the fastest possible delivery (either directly or via sub-distribution) and/or expediting production as required. We will also provide increased levels of design support and help for those designing such critical equipment. 

We’re just hours away from (virtually) celebrating Arduino Day! Join us on Saturday for our official livestream, starting at 2pm CET. We’ll connect with community events from all around the world as well as hear from Arduino team members like Fabio Violante, Massimo Banzi, and David Cuartielles.

Be sure to set a reminder and tune in!

We’ve partnered with Thales, Telstra and Microsoft to pave the way for scalable security for connected IoT devices, by implementing a solution that enables trusted and secure end-to-end communication between device and cloud.

The solution enables instant and standardized mutual authentication between a device and a cloud platform via cellular networks, while fully-complying with GSMA IoT SAFE security specifications.

Within the IoT ecosystem, billions of devices collect, process and send data to the cloud, where a range of different IoT services are executed. To enable security, the IoT cloud service must have absolute trust in data received from connected devices. Equally, devices need to trust the cloud. This is only possible if the device and server are mutually authenticated. However, the IoT devices market is so fragmented — with a patchwork of different operating systems and chips being utilized — that security services scalability and duplication are very limited.

That’s why Thales, Telstra, Microsoft[1]and Arduino[2] have decided to team up to work on a solution that addresses the challenge of securely and efficiently connecting IoT devices to clouds in the most simplified way and through cellular networks. The level of trust required is enabled by a sophisticated ‘security-by-design’ approach for any IoT devices based on field-proven and standardized SIM or eSIM technology.

As a result, as soon as an IoT device is switched on, any SIM or eSIM featuring Thales’s IoT SAFE application is automatically and securely provisioned. Once the IoT device gets a proper Digital Certificate created and stored in the SIM/eSIM, then a trusted communication between the device and the server is permitted, in full respect of data integrity and confidentiality.  

“We are very pleased to be part of the dream team composed by Thales, Telstra and Microsoft,” said Fabio Violante, Arduino CEO. “The development of this tool was a teamwork and a proof that Arduino is a great partner to create solid, reliable and easy to integrate hardware and software IoT solutions.“

[1] Microsoft integrated the IoT SAFE solution with their Azure IoT Hub and also provided Azure Stream Analytics, Cosmos DB and Power BI services to quickly enable the development of an example end-to-end IoT application.

[2] We developed a library (under an open source license) that implements the security mechanism of the GSMA IoT Safe standard on our MKR NB 1500 boards and provides a valid alternative to the usage of the crypto chip already present on the Arduino board. The project has been a great example of collaborations with companies operating in various IoT sectors through our brand new Arduino Pro division.

It’s been a long time since we first launched our Arduino IDE inspired by the glorious Processing interface, and what started as a Java UI wrapper for build scripts has gone through countless iterations over the past fifteen years.

Some may remember the transition between 1.0 and 1.5, or the application’s icon being replaced, but behind the scenes where many of our users don’t go look, we’ve completely overhauled the way libraries are included, code is cleaned, fail-safe measures are implemented, and a sketch is built.

At the same time our more advanced users have been implementing workarounds to use our internal builder command in their workflows for the most diverse reasons.

Projects have spawned to create Arduino-based makefiles, build scripts, code linters ,and snippets to program their boards using their favorite code editors, and we’ve seen people use Eclipse, Sublime Text, VS Code, Vi(m), Emacs, or even XCode to create Arduino projects.

We keep our eyes peeled when it comes to how our community uses our tools and try as much as possible to learn from it, and this inspired us to get back to the drawing board.

The software that makes up the Arduino platform has grown incrementally over time — new features were added and sometimes the need to quickly factor in those changes did not make it easy to foresee how things would develop years ahead. This led to a situation in which multiple chunks of code and functionalities were spread across different Arduino software products (the Java IDE, the Create Agent, the Web Editor servers, upload/discovery tools, etc.), some of them overlapping or redundant. 

The needs of our community, as well as our own, prompted us to radically rethink our approach and embark on a major refactoring operation with the goal to obtain a single reference implementation: the Arduino Command Line Interface.

As we move forward, all our legacy products are being reworked to use the Arduino CLI as the foundation to build upon.

We believe this effort will provide our users and ourselves with more advanced, flexible tools that we can all benefit from.

How it started

Following an extended period of internal use and exploration, we announced the Arduino CLI alpha preview in August 2018.

From that moment on we concentrated our efforts into adding features, smoothing out some edges, and improving the CLI usability, largely based on users’ feedback from within our community (check out our latest release on GitHub).

A tool to enable advanced workflows

Having a flexible yet simple command line tool providing all the features and flexibility that made Arduino a successful platform can enable users to find new ways of improving their productivity. A great example is how Arduino CLI has been used in Continuous Integration processes, a great example of which came from our friends at TensorFlow, a popular open source machine learning framework. This encouraged us to provide an official Arduino CLI GitHub Action.

This application demonstrates how the Arduino CLI is not just a command line tool, but contains all you need to easily build applications around the Arduino ecosystem. Parse the JSON output of the CLI or implement it as an always-on service that accepts commands via a gRPC interface using your language of choice.

We use gRPC in our Pro IDE and in recent releases of our classic Java IDE.

If you like, you can even use it in your Go application as a library. Our Web Editor services are built using this approach.

How it works

Arduino CLI allows you to replicate the same workflows you are used to with our IDE by using simple commands in a shell, your CI workflow, or wherever you see fit:

1. Install the board package and your favorite libraries on your PC.
2. Create a sketch using your favorite editor.
3. Compile and upload the sketch to your board.

We’re soon going to release our CLI primer to get you all onboard. Check out the trailer below for a sneak peek!

We’ve released the first prototype of one of the most requested Arduino Pro IDE features: the Arduino Debugger

Key features

• executes your Arduino sketch step-by-step while it’s running on your Arduino board!
• pause your sketch execution placing breakpoints
• inspect variables values during execution

Initially supporting SAMD21 boards the Arduino Pro IDE debugger is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux64.

You can try the Arduino Debugger as a feature of the latest Alpha preview version for the Arduino Pro IDE; more details like tutorials etc will follow on soon!

As part of Arduino’s expanding relationship with Arm and continuing commitment to professionals, Arm Pelion Device Management users can now seamlessly use Arduino IoT Cloud to quickly create IoT applications.

Combining the speed of application development of the low-code Arduino IoT Cloud with the secure, scalable lifecycle management features of Arm Pelion Device Management brings the best of both worlds.

The integration enables Pelion Device Management users to import all their resources via the Pelion API and translate them into Arduino IoT Cloud properties. They can see and manage everything in the cloud, with the Arduino IoT interface (web or mobile client) providing the simplicity for designers to focus their efforts on the IoT application, creating control panels and summary dashboards. Scalability is a fundamental of the Pelion Device Management service, and new devices will automatically appear in the Arduino IoT Cloud as soon as they are registered in Pelion.

If you are an existing client of Pelion Device Management and would like to know more about the integration with Arduino IoT Cloud and the professional services available from the Arduino Pro team, please contact us here. 

The new dashboard for the Arduino IoT Cloud comes with a host of enhanced features. It allows you to gather and display data from multiple IoT devices in one dashboard, and control those devices as required through your dashboard to fully integrate your solution.

Using widgets to connect to the properties enables you to set up a new dashboard in minutes, and you can fully customize your dashboard by: grouping devices however you like, dragging and dropping to rearrange the layout, and selecting from multiple options to visualize the data.

It is now possible to import historical data into the dashboard to provide a backdated view for all your properties, hence creating a new dashboard  no longer means losing previous information. You can present the information in your dashboard as far back as you’ve been collecting the data.

A new ‘duplicate dashboard” function lets you copy any of your existing dashboards setup and layout, plus you can easily see which things are associated with which devices when setting up a new solution.

It really is that simple!

Our dev team is grateful for the high quality contributions that the project is receiving, and is working hard to collect all the lovely feedback we have received to shape the Arduino CLI into the best tool possible for the community!

Highlights of our latest release include:

• Resource usage improvements
• Better libraries handling
• Bug fixing

You can see the full list of changes here.

Today, we are excited to announce the arrival of the Arduino IDE 1.8.12.

Wow! Another release just after two weeks, you ask?

Well, we fixed some serious bugs related to the compiler, and more importantly, we had to take a step back with respect to the transition to the new Java Virtual Machine from OpenJDK. Since we had received so many reports from our users, we decided to do a release with the old JVM in order to have a bit more time to properly handle those issues and at the same time guarantee a better experience to our users.

As usual, if you are curious, you can find the full changelog and contributors in the release notes here.