We’re excited to announce a new challenge with Amazon Alexa and Hackster.io, which invites the Arduino community to design the smart home gadgets of the future.

Makers have already come up with exciting ways to integrate Alexa and Arduino into their projects, from talking teddy bears and singing animatronic fish, to voice-controlled blinds and holiday decorations, to robotic coffee machines and drink mixers. And now, we want to see what next-generation devices you can come up with next. Personalized lighting? Room temperature automation? Security and doorbell systems? Pet toys and feeders?

Contest winners will be awarded with prizes that can help take their ideas from prototype to product through Dragon Innovation’s certification process, Kickstarter coaching sessions, cash, and more.

The Best Overall Alexa Smart Home Skill & Gadget winner will receive a prize package valued at $29,000:

• $14,000 cash
• Kickstarter Package: Promotional video and marketing fund
• Dragon Innovation Certification
• A 60-minute Kickstarter coaching session (to take your project to product)

Want to learn more about the Alexa and Arduino Smart Home Challenge? You can find a full list of rules and prizes here.

Just days after celebrating the Arduino 101‘s first birthday at Maker Faire Rome, we’ve partnered with Hackster, Intel, and Seeed Studio to launch an exciting new contest. We’re challenging you to unleash the powers of the Intel® Curie™ Module-based board and “Invent Your Future.”

Perhaps you want to build an autonomous boat for collecting ocean pollution data, or a pair of shoes that play different sounds for different exercises, or maybe even a wireless gesture-based home automation controller? Whatever you choose, we want to see how you use the Arduino 101 as the brains behind your next creation.

For those who may not be familiar with the 101, the board combines the performance and low-power consumption of the Intel® Curie™ Module with the simplicity of Arduino. It keeps the same robust form factor and peripheral list as the Uno with the addition of Bluetooth LE capabilities and a six-axis accelerometer/gyro to help you easily expand your creativity into the connected world.

The Arduino 101 is designed with two tiny 32MHz cores: an x86 (Curie™, a Quark™ module) and a 32-bit ARC architecture core. Even with this added power, the Arduino 101 is still programmable using sketches from the Arduino IDE.

And now back to the contest… To kick off things, Hackster is giving away 150 Arduino 101 and Seeed Studio Grove Starter Kits to the best ideas submitted by November 20, 2016. But that’s not all, top entries in each category?—?smart home, environment, and healthcare—will receive a Microsoft Surface Pro 4! You have until February 26, 2017 to submit your projects!

Want to learn more? Head over to the contest’s official page on Hackster.io.

Just days after celebrating the Arduino 101‘s first birthday at Maker Faire Rome, we’ve partnered with Hackster, Intel, and Seeed Studio to launch an exciting new contest. We’re challenging you to unleash the powers of the Intel® Curie™ Module-based board and “Invent Your Future.”

Perhaps you want to build an autonomous boat for collecting ocean pollution data, or a pair of shoes that play different sounds for different exercises, or maybe even a wireless gesture-based home automation controller? Whatever you choose, we want to see how you use the Arduino 101 as the brains behind your next creation.

For those who may not be familiar with the 101, the board combines the performance and low-power consumption of the Intel® Curie™ Module with the simplicity of Arduino. It keeps the same robust form factor and peripheral list as the Uno with the addition of Bluetooth LE capabilities and a six-axis accelerometer/gyro to help you easily expand your creativity into the connected world.

The Arduino 101 is designed with two tiny 32MHz cores: an x86 (Curie™, a Quark™ module) and a 32-bit ARC architecture core. Even with this added power, the Arduino 101 is still programmable using sketches from the Arduino IDE.

And now back to the contest… To kick off things, Hackster is giving away 150 Arduino 101 and Seeed Studio Grove Starter Kits to the best ideas submitted by November 20, 2016. But that’s not all, top entries in each category?—?smart home, environment, and healthcare—will receive a Microsoft Surface Pro 4! You have until February 26, 2017 to submit your projects!

Want to learn more? Head over to the contest’s official page on Hackster.io.

Being a dumb and clumsy robot has never been as fun as in the stupid robots competition Hebocon. This competition series is described as “robot contests for the technically ungifted” by its creator Daiju Ishikawa, and encourages anyone to join with no prior knowledge of robotics necessary.

What’s neat is that unlike other awards, Hebocon’s are symbolic as they are usually made out of recycled parts from every robot in the competition!

So far there have been two editions of Hebocon in Spain (Valencia and Makespace Madrid) where our very own David Cuartielles participated as a judge.

Last weekend, Cuartielles was invited to the Hebocon World Championship in Tokyo where he served on the judging panel alongside Nifty’s Dr. Kunio Matsui and an executive from NicoTsuku (a company dedicated to digital communities). The event drew a total of 32 robots from all across the world, including the United States, Hong Kong, Iceland, France, Singapore, Greece, Taiwan and Japan.

The winners were:

Nifty Award: An unusual car with a spinning doll that shot fake banknotes

NicoTsuku Award: A robot with a middle-age man that turned a table upside down (a literal representation of a Japanese colloquial expression that means getting mad)

Arduino/Genuino Award: A crocodile robot made by a 10-year-old that previously participated in Maker Faire Tokyo

The ‘Remote-Controlled Robot’ from Hong Kong won the sumo competition and it was about fooling the opponent by switching the roles of the remote control and the robot.

Thanks for inviting us to Hebocon’s World Championship 2016! Check out more on Twitter! 

The Academy Awards night is coming and it’s a perfect moment to be nominated and  win a prize.  Casa Jasmina project won its prize yesterday: the Internet of Things Awards, showcasing excellence in all areas across the Internet of Things since 2011, in the category of best IoT open source project – Editors Choice Winner.

The Open Source award “honors projects that bring those values to the Internet of Things, either by incorporating open source technology or by making public the details of their own designs and software”, this is the idea of the IoT awards organization in which Casa Jasmina completely believes.

The open source movement is for Arduino and consequently for Casa Jasmina, the core of internet in terms of hardware, software and protocols that compose the global communication infrastructure, and in this way the power of collaborative development is the main focus of Casa Jasmina idea.

As a futuristic Wunderkammer, Casa Jasmina will collect and share artificialia to present in a open way system what and how the IoT concepts will change the daily home life.

Winning this competition is for Casa Jasmina the acknowledgement of a project that take on to transform into reality a series of reflections around IoT and open source. Casa Jasmina is really proud to have been selected between 21 projects, because this represent the attention we are trying to attract.

There is still a lot of work, Casa Jasmina is working hard to rich the goal; it’s not simple but awards like this give hope to the project, and show the interest that exists on these issues.

So thank you all

(Read the blogpost on Casa Jasmina blog)

It’s a great pleasure to introduce the new member of the Arduino and Genuino family: MKR1000 is a powerful board that combines the functionality of the Zero and the connectivity of the Wi-Fi Shield.

It’s based on the Atmel ATSAMW25 that is part of the SmartConnect family of Atmel Wireless devices, specifically designed for IoT. It offers the ideal solution for makers seeking to add Wi-Fi connectivity with minimal previous experience in networking.

The new board will be available for purchase from February 2016 but starting today #1000 MKR1000 can be won in the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge in collaboration with Hackster.IO and Microsoft.

We want to celebrate the maker community so we thought there’s no better way to do that than encourage inventors, artists, makers, hobbyists or professionals and developers to create on Arduino. The contest is very flexible – choose anything you want to build from environmental sensors to gaming, augmented reality, robotics or UAVs using the power of Arduino.cc boards and Windows 10.

The 1,000 makers who submit the best project ideas will receive the newly released Arduino MKR1000 (US only) and Genuino MKR1000 (Outside US) boards. Then three finalists submitting the best completed projects will be awarded with a fully-funded trip to Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York or Rome; a chance to present their creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino and Genuino booths; a professional video production of the project; and a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

Contest starts today,  December 9th 2015, when participants can sign up or log into Hackster and enter to win the new MKR1000 board by pitching the idea. Idea submissions close on January 15, 2016 at 11:59 PM (PT).

Save the date and participate now!

It’s a great pleasure to introduce the new member of the Arduino and Genuino family: MKR1000 is a powerful board that combines the functionality of the Zero and the connectivity of the Wi-Fi Shield.

It’s based on the Atmel ATSAMW25 that is part of the SmartConnect family of Atmel Wireless devices, specifically designed for IoT. It offers the ideal solution for makers seeking to add Wi-Fi connectivity with minimal previous experience in networking.

The new board will be available for purchase from February 2016 but starting today #1000 MKR1000 can be won in the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge in collaboration with Hackster.IO and Microsoft.

We want to celebrate the maker community so we thought there’s no better way to do that than encourage inventors, artists, makers, hobbyists or professionals and developers to create on Arduino. The contest is very flexible – choose anything you want to build from environmental sensors to gaming, augmented reality, robotics or UAVs using the power of Arduino.cc boards and Windows 10.

The 1,000 makers who submit the best project ideas will receive the newly released Arduino MKR1000 (US only) and Genuino MKR1000 (Outside US) boards. Then three finalists submitting the best completed projects will be awarded with a fully-funded trip to Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York or Rome; a chance to present their creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino and Genuino booths; a professional video production of the project; and a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

Contest starts today,  December 9th 2015, when participants can sign up or log into Hackster and enter to win the new MKR1000 board by pitching the idea. Idea submissions close on January 15, 2016 at 11:59 PM (PT).

Save the date and participate now!

Arduino Verkstad is partner of the Nordic Internet of Things Hackathon 2015 organized in collaboration with Mobile Heights & the MVD Project and taking place April 10th-12th, 2015 in the city of Lund Sweden. Programmers, interaction designers, professionals and enthusiasts  are invited to a 50-hour competition for attendees from any part of the globe no matter their technical skills on two topics: Smart Transportation or Smart Home.

The great news is that the organisation is ready to pay travel expenses to up 10 teams from outside Sweden. You can submit your idea or project proposal within the Hackathon’s framework and if it gets accepted they will fly you here to compete against the other teams.

Read more about it at this link