This is the message Massimo Banzi’s just published on the forum.

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Today is the day of a solar eclipse, some of these are once in a lifetime events.

Arduino is definitely one of the events that will define my life along with many other people’s life.

I’m feeling incredibly blessed to have contributed to create this amazing community which gathered around the idea that we can empower people to master complex technologies and unleash their ability to create with them.

Dear community I’m sorry I didn’t comment earlier, I was keeping quiet to try to find a resolution to our internal issues that would not damage you, the community.

We’ve been so committed to keep the issues internal that for a year we haven’t receiving any royalty from the boards made in Italy, but we continued to work hoping to find a solution. I’ve told the story to Make read it if you want to know more.

Now the other party has abandoned the negotiating table and, after a lot of recent events, the cat is out of the bag. I owe you to be part of what is going on.

We created Arduino based on a set of values that have enabled the community to grow, touch any kind of people and contribute to changing the world a bit.

I am here to say that we will continue to fight so that Arduino stays true to those values. There is only one Arduino and there is only one Arduino community. We’re strong, we’re having a positive impact on so many people’s life.

We have so many news we want to share with you but be patient until Arduino Day, let’s celebrate together the amazing community we are (261 Global events!!!) , and you’ll know more.

I’m sure you have a lot of questions an we’re going to try to answer them in due time, compatibly with the fact that lawyers are involved and I can’t say too much.

An eclipse is just a temporary moment of darkness, but soon after the sun comes back shining.

The sun is about to come out, wear your sunglasses!!

Massimo Banzi with David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe , David Mellis

If you live in Boston (USA), Torino (Italy), Malmo (Sweden), Budapest (Hungary), Bangalore (India) you could come and participate to one of the 5 official Arduino Day events on Saturday, March the 28th by our local offices and hosted at MIT Media Lab:

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

And there is more! You can take part of the event not only as a visitor but also as  a protagonist. Today we’ve opened the call for volunteers, projects and talks. You’ll be having fun with us and Arduino!

Are you interested? These are the requirements:

– Must be comfortable with simple Arduino hardware and software
– Must be able to explain Arduino concepts to visitors without overwhelming them with technical details
– Must be able to engage in friendly conversations with strangers

We’ll offer as a token of appreciation an official Arduino t-shirt, lunch, and a discount coupon for our online store!

Are you interested? Fill the form. We’ll ping you back! Thanks!

After almost two years “in the making” we’re thrilled to announce the availability of the Arduino IDE 1.6.0. The latest version of the development environment used by millions of people across the globe brings about a lot of improvements.

Since the day we started developing the first 1.5 version we have received a lot of feedback, suggestions and contributions from our vibrant community and we would like to thank you all for your passion and good will: thank you everyone, you rock!

We are glad to say that 1.6.0 includes a lot of new features. Here is a not so brief list of them:

• Support for multiple platforms
• Boards are detected and listed on “ports list” menu together with the serial port
• Drivers and IDE are now signed for Windows and MacOSX
• Improved speed of build process
• Autosave when compiling/uploading sketch
• A lot of improvements of the serial monitor (faster, backed by modern JSSC serial library instead of old RXTX)
• Find/replace over multiple tabs
• Improved lots of Arduino API libraries (String, Serial, Print, etc.)
• Tools & toolchains upgrades (avr-gcc, arm-gcc, avrdude, bossac)
• Command line interface
• IDE reports both sketch size and static RAM usage
• Editor shows line numbers
• Scrollable menus when many entries are listed
• Upload via network (Yún)
• HardwareSerial has been improved
• USB has got some stability and performance improvements
• SPI library now supports “transactions” for better interoperability when using multiple SPI devices at the same time
• Better support to 3rd party hardware vendors with configuration files (platform.txt and boards.txt)
• Submenus with board configuration can now be defined
• Fix for upload problems on Leonardo, Micro and Yún.
• Libraries bundled with Arduino have been improved and bugfixed, in particular: Bridge, TFT, Ethernet, Robot_Control, SoftwareSerial, GSM
• A lot of minor bugs of the user interface have been fixed

There is still lots of room for improvement, of course. 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.

We are already working on release 1.6.1, with some very cool features we will announce in the coming weeks.

The IDE is available from the newly redesigned Download page.

Last October at Maker Faire Rome, Massimo Banzi, Bruce Sterling and Lorenzo Romagnoli announced a new exciting project.
The project, called Casa Jasmina, is a real Apartment in Turin, hosted by Toolbox Coworking in a old industrial building already shared by Officine Arduino (the Italian Arduino headquarter), and Fablab Torino.

The apartment will serve as test bed for the latest development from the open source community. We will explore the boundaries in the field of open source connected home showcasing the best of open source furnitures, connected objects, and white goods hacks.

Shortly anyone will have the opportunity to experience living in a open source connected home, Casa Jasmina will be available for rent on Airbnb.

Do you want to collaborate with us or propose your ideas? Please check the partnership opportunities and get in touch! hashtag #CasaJasmina

Today we are launching the official online presence of the project and to celebrate the kickoff of Casa Jasmina website, we are happy to share Bruce Sterling thoughts on the project.

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A New Domestic Italian Landscape

A lot has already been said about the Internet of Things, so the time has come to attempt to live the dream.

As a science fiction writer and design critic, I’m all for speculation. However, the IoT is no longer a theory. It features genuine industrial consortia, proliferating standards, and exciting new capacities in sensors, data, and analytics. The Internet of Things is coming into the home, and that most definitely includes the Italian home.

So, how will that happen? It seems there are five basic approaches.

1. THING CENTERED. In this model, every object has its own Internet connectivity and they all talk to each other independently. It’s like the old-school Internet, but with things instead of websites.
2. GATEWAY CENTERED. There’s a home control box or a router which serves as a boss for all the anarchic things, enforces a standard on them, and protects them from security attacks.
3. MOBILE CENTERED. The real action inside in the operating system of a powerful personal smartphone, which acts as the handheld remote-control for everything.
4. CLOUD CENTERED. The household Internet of Things is run by offshored professionals who have advanced data analytics and can manage all domestic objects and services for a fee.
5. INDUSTRIAL FOG. Everything is run locally, but with an urban, automated factory-style model that includes building management software and Smart City services.

What’s missing in these five models of the IoT? A user-centered model, a citizen-centered model, an open-source collaborative model. That’s the prospect that interests us at “Casa Jasmina,” the Torino Fab Lab / Toolbox Co-Working domestic lab in Torino, Italy.

This design approach is what we can contribute, from Torino, to this epic world struggle — and it is epic, and it is a world struggle of great consequence to us and everyone else.

The older, customer model, where twentieth-century consumers bought their dumb appliances from simple boxes and plugged them in, is becoming extinct. A new domestic landscape is becoming visible. We want to bring that to life with the values of “Make In Italy” — rapid invention, plenty of mistakes, and results that combine innovation with elegance.

My role in Casa Jasmina is that of curator. In the blizzard of new things that constitutes the Internet of Things, I have to figure out what belongs on the premises. Casa Jasmina an actual, functional apartment directly above the lasers, routers and 3DPrinters of the famous Torino Fab Lab. It will have guests in it; people will sit in the chairs, sleep in the beds. I will personally test every last “thing” that goes in there.

Our first piece of household furniture is already chosen: it’s “Pietro Micca,” our pet Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. I chose this vacuum cleaner as our mascot, not because it’s “high tech,” but because the Roomba line is ten years old, well-established, a living reality of domestic home automation. “Pietro Micca” will be martyred, because we are going to hack him relentlessly, but he represents “normal life.” That’s what we want to see and display in Casa Jasmina — the “normal life” of about ten years from now.

 Soon, as Casa Jasmina’s curator, I will be “accessing” many other objects and services. We are looking for sponsors, advisors, experimenters, and developers. Let me be quite specific. These are among the things we need.

• A terrace garden. This is an Italian home and we want living things to grow, flower, and thrive there.
• A study area including a bookshelf, effective task lighting, and cultural materials reflecting our Make in Italy values.
• Artworks including electronic art displays.
• A guide to Torino for our many foreign friends. How does an Internet-of-Things home properly display the city that surrounds it?
• A functional kitchen. Being Turinese, we naturally favor Slow Food that is good, clean and fair.
• Children’s toys and furniture. How does an Internet-of-Things home respond to small, innocent people who are not its power-users and don’t interact with its controls? Children are participants in home life and any proper home design takes their needs into account.
• Temperature control, water control, electricity monitors, building-management services.
• Household appliances.
• Party supplies. A congenial home of the future must stand ready to entertain!

Bruce Sterling

Last year, during the first celebration of Arduino Day more than 240 user groups, makerspaces, hackerspaces, fablabs, schools, studios and educators throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Australia planned activities, workshops, events for a wide range of audiences and skillsets. They celebrated together the open source community gathered around Arduino globally.

We are now organizing the second edition of this worldwide anniversary celebrating Arduino community and the makers’ movement. Everyone can participate in the role of organizer or as a participant.
Stay tuned because at the beginning of February we’ll be launching the open call for entries. In the meanwhile check the countdown here http://arduinoday.tv – Hashtag: #ArduinoD15

Tekniska Museum of Stockholm in collaboration with Italian Embassy, and the Royal Institute of Technology  (KTH), will host a special edition of the Arduino Day on the 26th of November.

Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles together with professors from KTH and some of the most creative professionals, students and enthusiasts, will be the protagonists of a showcase of inspirational lectures and Pop Up speeches suitable for both hardcore Arduino fans as well as for the curious newbie.

Are you in Stockholm next week? Come and say hello!

The program

Part 1: h.14:00 – 16:00 (Entrance with museum Ticket)

Presentations and Q&A in Althinsalen at Tekniska museet.

– Massimo Banzi (Arduino founder)
– David Cuartielles (Arduino founder)
– Clara Leivas (Interaction Designer)
– Dr Jon-Erik Dahlin (KTH) Ellen Sundh (Creative Technologist)
– Sagar Moreshwar Behere, PhD (KTH)

Part 2: h.16:00 – 20:00 (free entrance from 17:00)

Four hours of Arduino Maker Faire in Eventrummet at Tekniska museet.

Professionals, students and amateurs show their Arduino projects with improvised Pop-Up talks among the projects.

– Massimo Banzi (Arduino founder)
– David Cuartielles (Arduino founder)
– Ellen Sundh (Creative Technologist)
– Dr Carlo Fischione, (KTH)
– Dr Jon-Erik Dahlin (KTH)
– Rickard Dahlstrand (.SE)
– Members of Stockholm Robot Society Members of Stockholm Maker Space
– Leonardo Araujo de Assis (University of Brasilia)

Last year Massimo Banzi wrote a long post on this blog to explain the genealogy of Arduino.  He described how an open-hardware project, designed to lower the barriers to prototyping interactive projects, was able to find its way into economical sustainability and still keep innovating.

He clearly explained what an original Arduino is, and why its cost is a matter of maintaining an open-source ecosystem, and not only of manufacturing and distributing the boards.

He detailed out what ‘counterfeit Arduinos’ are, and why they are harmful to the whole open-source hardware movement. We release Arduino’s hardware design files so that people could make their own versions, but this doesn’t mean manufacturing boards only for profit and pretending to be Arduino.

 We don’t release any element of the Arduino brand identity (logo and graphics of the boards), so whoever uses the trademarked Arduino graphics makes a deliberate act of Trademark infringement and prevent us in our effort to guarantee the quality of our products, always replaceable if defective.

We also created a page on our website showing how to spot a counterfeit Arduino.

As you can see at the link, we recently upgraded the page with new pictures as we are entering a new phase: we are redesigning the PCB silkscreens of all Arduino boards, in production in the next few months. As you might imagine, this is going to be a long process as it cannot happen in one night. The new silk will be better counterfeit-proof, and will allow you to recognise an original Arduino just by a quick look.

As you can see in the images above (click on the images for hi-res), we changed some graphic elements of the board and also switched to a different shade of teal.

In the next months we will upgrade the pictures of the boards in the product pages of the Arduino website as they roll out and are distributed around the world. It’s a transitioning phase so stay tuned for more news on the blog!

We are really happy to share with you that at the beginning of the week Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator Department of Architecture and Design) and Michelle Millar Fisher, (Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design) published on the Moma blog a post announcing the acquisition of Arduino  and other DIY electronic devices in the collection of the  Museum of Modern Art of New York City, with this explanation:

As design curators, we have an instinctive response to designs we find compelling, and when that feeling survives the passing of time, we know we’re on to something worthwhile. We believe our new acquisitions will withstand that test. All promise to make a difference—not just in the utopian “design can save the world” kind of way (always good, but often a high bar for any one object), but at the very micro level. We all know what it feels like to master a skill previously thought completely outside our abilities, or to unlock new possibilities of experience and thought. It’s exhilarating, life-changing, and (healthily) addictive, the same reason people keep coming back to see MoMA’s Pollocks and Picassos—and, we hope, this new group of humble masterpieces.

That’s how they are describing Arduino:

A tiny but powerful microcontroller, the Arduino is an open-source, programmable microchip housed on a circuit board that fits in the palm of one’s hand—an apt metaphor for the control over design functions that it allows its user—and a pillar of contemporary maker culture and practice. Designed by a star-studded team, the Arduino can be programmed to drive components such as sensors, LEDs, and motors in order to build and develop all kinds of interactive objects. This new building block of design has resulted in applications as diverse as light sculptures, digital pollution detectors, and tools to help people who are unable to use such common interfaces as a computer mouse. Beyond its concrete applications, the Arduino acts as a platform for the interdisciplinary practice that lies at the heart of so much compelling contemporary work across science and the humanities.

Read the post on the Moma blog.

Let’s Make! (A Better World) is the title of the Maker Faire Rome Opening Conference  taking place tomorrow October 2 on the stage of Sinopoli Hall at the Auditorium Parco della Musica from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

Many of the actors of the Third Industrial Revolution are going to unfold how this is changing our lives forever and if you want to hear it live, book your free ticket now!

The morning session will host, among the others,  sci-fi author Cory Doctorow and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti who, just a few days later, will take off on a long space mission bringing tools made by makers; Massimo Banzi will close the session with a keynote about Arduino manifesto on Internet of Things.

The afternoon session will be dedicated to economist Mariana Mazzucato, explaining why this “revolution without permission” needs an innovative Country, and to cyborg artist Neil Haribisson, the first person in the world to have an antenna integrated in his skull.

Are you already in Rome and coming to Maker Faire? Share you pics and videos using the hashtags #MFR14 and #Arduino

After the sneak peak of some days ago, we are happy to officially announce the Arduino 3d printer . Completely open source and affordable, Arduino Materia 101 is a device aiming at simplifying access to the world of 3D printing and rapid prototyping.

Materia 101 is a precision 3D printer running on Arduino Mega, designed and developed in Italy, thanks to the collaboration of Arduino and Sharebot, two companies working with a similar approach to technology. It is ideal for beginners, makers and education.

Materia 101’s visual identity is curated by studio ToDo: the choice of essentiality of design and the white color of the machine suggests its ease of use.

The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled. Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD.
The official presentation will be held during Maker Faire Rome, 3-5 October 2014. 

Technical characteristics:
Printing technology: Fused Filament Fabrication
Printing area: 140 x 100 x 100 mm +/- 5mm
X and Y theorical resolution position: 0,06 mm
Z resolution: 0.0025 mm
Extrusion diameter: 0.35 mm
Filament diameter: 1.75 mm
Optimal temperatures with PLA: 200-230°
Tested and supported filaments: PLA
Unsupported but tested filaments: Cristal Flex, PLA Thermosense, Thermoplastic Polyuretane
(TPU), PET, PLA Sand, PLA Flex
External dimensions: 310 x 330 x 350 mm
Weight: 10 kg
Usage: 65 watt
Electronical board: Official Arduino Mega 2560 with Open Source Marlin Firmware
LCD display 20 x 4 with encoder menu
Preloaded with PLA printing presets
Extruder block with filament pressure regulation