It’s a special day for the Makers’ community. Massimo Banzi is in San Francisco attending Build Conference, the biggest developer event of the calendar year for Microsoft and today Microsoft is  announcing a strong partnership with Arduino: Windows 10 is in fact the world’s first Arduino certified operating system!

‘Arduino Certified’  Windows 10 enables makers to easily create smart objects combining hardware-driving capability of Arduino with the software capabilities of Windows.

For example, a security camera can be built by using Arduino to power the motors controls to tilt/turn the camera and using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to create great UI, to connect the camera to the cloud, to process the image for motion detection and for adding facial/voice recognition.

The makers’ community can now also enjoy Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino technologies – both released as open source libraries.

With Windows Remote Arduino developers can (wirelessly) access the capabilities of  Windows 10 devices as if they were physically attached to an Arduino Shield and leveraging Arduino functions directly from Universal Windows Application.

In this way Microsoft is enabling developers to extend their Universal Windows Platform Application with Arduino commands (that execute on a wirelessly connected Arduino device). Combining the power of Windows 10 devices including features such as Image processing, Speech recognition, Website parsing, Cameras and Advanced Audio pipelines with the power of physical world interactivity through Arduino enables incredible new scenarios to be created. Take a look at this Basic Windows Remote Arduino project to learn how to leverage this technology in any interactive project.

With Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino, users can tap into the incredible power of their Windows 10 devices through wireless protocols. For example Lumia 530 contains a lot of Arduino Shield capabilities and allows designers/makers to connect all those components seamlessly. Imagine being able to create an Arduino project that includes GPS, Web connectivity/parsing, touch display, speech technologies and more! Take a look at this Picture the Weather project created to bring children’s drawings to life!

Arduino is really happy that Microsoft got inspired by the enthusiasm and passion for technology represented by the Maker community and we look forward to see the amazing projects opening up from this unique offering.

Last year Maker Faire Rome welcomed 600 projects, 200 performances, 90.000 visitors coming from all over the world.  Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition recently announced its third edition scheduled from the 16th to the 18th of October 2015 and will take place at  “La Sapienza” University in Rome, exceptionally “closed” for three days to host this international event.

The Curators of the Faire, Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino and Riccardo Luna, italian Digital Champion, are inviting makers of all kinds and ages to showcase their amazing work and embrace the do-it-yourself (or do-it-together) spirit with a great and appreciative audience.

Are you a Maker, an Innovator, a digital Craftsman? The MakerFaireRome’s Call4Makers is out!

There are many ways to participate:

• you can exhibit your project: we’ll give you a booth with table and chairs inside the halls, which will be filled with visitors who are curious and interested in meeting you
• you can give a presentation in public: we’ll give you a room or a stage where you can talk about your project or tell your story or deal with the issues that you want to propose
• you can hold a workshop: we’ll give you a workshop area where you can do interactive demonstrations and engage participants -adults and / or children- in practical activities
• you can perform in public: we’ll give you a space or a stage for you to perform in your creative, technological, robotic, musical, pyrotechnic performance…

The proposals regarding the exposure of projects, if accepted, will lead to the allocation of a booth, free of charge. Presence is required at this booth while Maker Faire Rome 2015 is open to the public (three days). It will also be possible to sell products or gadgets.

Accepted projects will be valorized on the MakerFaire Rome website. Besides, Maker Faire Rome press & media team will diffuse info about participants to the newspapers, radio and television stations, which in the past years have devoted a lot of attention to the projects and performers.

We expect creative, innovative, fun, interactive projects, showing the process by which the achievements enrich visitors, communicating passion and ingenuity.

Are you thinking about participanting? In the meanwhile:

• spread the word! #MFR15
• help us to involve all the makers you know (and especially those who still do not know they are makers!)
• subscribe to our newsletter to keep informed about news, events and discounts!

We are looking forward to seeing you all in Rome in October!

The last couple of months have been the most exciting of my entire career. Here at Arduino we are doing a big shift in terms of technology, user experience, and web improvements.

A new Arduino web ecosystem is arising, and the first hint of this new approach is visible in the Arduino Day website. This single-page website was the perfect fit to start experimenting with some new technologies we wanted to put in production. The Arduino Day website was a testbed for some new features of the new architecture we want to achieve.

Goals

1. Website online and running 99.98% of the time
2. Fast on every device
3. Easy way to push updates online
4. New theme with a single page app
5. Clear division between presentation and functionalities (client/server architecture)
6. Https whenever is possible
7. Microservices

People

How did we achieve these results? It has been a challenge but, from November on, we started building a new Web team with a good mix of junior and more experienced developers. Putting together the team has been key, but we also needed to change some aspects of the way we work.

The team has been always under a tight schedule, at first we started fixing legacy bugs all around, many are still in progress, but we also started experimenting with new things. We started following the agile development methods, including a daily standup meeting to better coordinate our team of designers and developers, we create dedicated topic channel in our chat system to better tackle issues and follow the improvements roadmap, and we created clear todo lists organized by priority.

Technologies

1. Go Language at the heart of our Web Applications
2. Angular.js as the framework to create complex and nice websites
3. PHP for widely used Application built by other communities (forum, blog, etc.)

We based most of our web applications on PHP for many reasons. It is widely used, there are many developers proficient in it, and many of the Arduino developers are familiar with it.

If you are a tech addicted like me you know there are many downsides of using PHP, or at least it was not a good fit for us for many different reasons.

We wanted to separate the frontend and the backend, we have frontend engineers and web designers that are very good at css/js, and backend engineers who knows how to design a REST API. The division of tasks allows developers to feel comfortable in their own expertise area.

We need frequent updates to our web applications and most of the apps are custom.

This ended up in having an easy way to update the system, with just a single binary and all dependencies in it. In addition we planned to have many microservices, each of them doing just one small thing, the Unix way. The language of our choice was Go.

Go is a relatively new language and allowed us to create REST API in few hours/days. It is impressively fast and soon we figured out that our bottleneck was not the language/framework neither the application, but our database (we are thinking about moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL, MongoDB or RethinkDB -very impressed by the last one-)

Having a single binary application made it extremely easy to setup a scalable architecture. Now adding a new server to our load balancer requires just a couple of minutes and it is almost completely automated.

 The frontend of Arduino Day Website is written using the Angular.js framework, allowing us to have a very interactive and responsive interface with an easy way to deploy. Everything is deployed to a nginx server (soon we will use something like Amazon S3), the files are minified and compressed so that the website is relatively fast.

I know this is not exactly cutting edge, but it is very hard to introduce something new in an environment developed for many years and used by so many users of our community. You cannot just introduce a new feature or start a project from scratch, you need to support your old code, keep it running, maintaining it and possibly avoid downtimes and maintenance windows.

Learning from mistakes

We are makers, we made mistakes. Every transition is risky and could end up is some issues. We took the risk when we migrated the forum to a new unstable version and we made a mistake, we learnt a lot from it and we are trying to similar issues as much as possible in the future.

Doing good things is hard, it requires time and the constant feedback from our amazing community. Many of you helped us already giving feedback on the arduino.cc website, the Arduino Day website, the forum and so on. We keep improving the whole web platform as fast as we can, and obviously we are always looking for the right new talent to join the Arduino team.

We are very pleased to announce the availability of Intel® Galileo and Edison boards support with the Arduino IDE Boards Manager.

If you’ve already installed the Arduino IDE 1.6.3 (or newer), you are already set!

Just click on menu Tools > Board > Boards Manager to find both Galileo and Edison listed and available for download. Click on one of the list, then click Install. Wait a couple of minutes for the IDE to download and unpack all the needed tools and voilà: Board menu will list the Intel board of your choice.

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.3) is available at the download page!
The Arduino IDE 1.6.3 is a bug fix release: after having released 1.6.2 with new libraries and cores managers, we received lots of useful feedback and fixed a handful of bugs.

In particular:

• Fixed some impolite crashes on some Linux distributions
• Bundled AVR core files are back into hardware folder
• Fixed “https” links not working on Windows and Mac
• Added new Arduino Language color highlight
• Introduced a way to help old cores to work with newer IDEs without having to upgrade their code
• Advise of duplicate libraries after compiling. Thanks @PaulStoffregen

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to check out the Library Manager: at the time of writing, 144 libraries are listed, thanks to the contributions of Paul Stoffregen and Adafruit.

Just a quick note on the Arduino Language color coding, we assigned different colors to the three Language categories listed in the Arduino Reference. Structure keywords are green, variables are teal, while functions stays orange. We did a lot of user testing on these new color highlights, and it is helpful for beginners to have a bit more of a visual cue when starting to write code.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

Happy hacking!

As part of the many news we are going to release in the next few months, we are glad to announce today a new Arduino Store completely based in the USA. Check it out at store-usa.arduino.cc, and discover some interesting features:

• New Arduino products soon available for the US market only
• Shipping within North America is cheaper and faster, since we send items directly from the US via FedEx and USPS
• New design, completely responsive, purchase items from mobiles and tablets too
• Very fast!
• Checkout is 100% security compliant with PCI DSS
• Easy way to find and share your favourite products via social networks

It is a pleasure to announce it right after the success of Arduino Day Events all over the world!

Arduino is officially 10 years old and celebrating during Arduino Day!
Watch the video with Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe hangout with all the Official Arduino Day events:

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.2) is available at the download page!

The Arduino IDE 1.6.2 features new one click install of boards and libraries.

With 1.6.2, two new menu items are available: “Sketch > Include Library > Manage Libraries…” and “Tools > Board > Boards Manager…”

We have written two guides that explain how to use them. Discover how to use the Library Manager and how to install support for additional boards.

If you don’t find your preferred library in the list, let us know: open an issue on github and request us to add the library you love!

Having such tools allow us to better and easier deliver updates for both cores and libraries: just open Library Manager or Boards Manager to find an Update button on the updatable items.

IDE 1.6.2 also includes a handful of bug fixes and improvements, also thanks to our fantastic community of hackers and makers:

• Ever suffered of a super slow Tools menu? Solved! Ports list gets refreshed in background, so you won’t need to wait any more.
• We have dropped support for Mac OS X 10.6 or older: previous versions of the IDE will remain available for download at the previous releases page.
• A new EEPROM library, thanks to @Chris–A
• Pre and post build hooks, thanks to @Wackerbarth
• Various bug fixes, thanks to @Timmmm, @vicatcu, @arve0 and @Xuth

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

Session of work on 1.6.3 will start on Monday: we are now enjoying  Arduino Day!

Tomorrow we are celebrating Arduino and its community with a day of official and self-organised gatherings, encouraging people to meet and share their interest in open source DIY electronics with neighbors and friends. More than 250 user groups, makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs, schools, studios, and educators around the world joined us with a series of unique activities designed for a wide range of audiences and skillsets.

Like last year we created a map to identify all community events going on throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa,  Australia and make it easier for you to find an event near you on the Arduino Day website . In 2015 even more collectives appeared on the map, you can explore them now clicking on the pic below:

The official events

Starting in the morning of Saturday 28th Arduino co-founders and staff are going to be in the following events:

• Arduino (hosted by MIT Media Lab), Boston,Massachusetts, USA
• Officine Arduino, Torino, Italy
• Arduino Verkstad, Malmo, Sweden
• Arduino Karkhana, Bangalore, India
• Arduino Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

To make this event a truly connected experience share your Arduino moments on social networks using the hashtag: #ArduinoD15

#ArduinoD15 Tweets<>

Today we are adding to Arduino website a new important page. It’s called About Us and presents all the people working at Arduino, side by side with the Arduino founders, from different locations around the world.

Our big team, with its multifaceted skillset, takes care of the complexity of an open-source hardware project like Arduino, made by the Hardware, the Software, the Design of all the artifacts and the user experience, the coordination of these activities by the Management, and of course the work with its Community of volunteers and enthusiasts.

This almost invisible works helps Arduino thrive and hopefully makes it easier for you to learn electronics and have fun!

Come meet us on March 28th in all the official locations of Arduino Day!