There’s a new documentary series on Al Jazeera called Rebel Geeks that looks at the people who make the stuff everyone uses. The latest 25-minute part of the series is with [Massimo], chief of the arduino.cc camp. Upcoming episodes include Twitter co-creator [Evan Henshaw-Plath] and people in the Madrid government who are trying to build a direct democracy for the city on the Internet.

Despite being a WiFi device, the ESP8266 is surprisingly great at being an Internet of Thing. The only problem is the range. No worries; you can use the ESP as a WiFi repeater that will get you about 0.5km further for each additional repeater node. Power is of course required, but you can stuff everything inside a cell phone charger.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the most common use for the Raspberry Pi is a vintage console emulator. Now there’s a Kickstarter for a dedicated tabletop Raspi emulation case that actually looks good.

Pogo pins are the go-to solution for putting firmware on hundreds of boards. These tiny spring-loaded pins give you a programming rig that’s easy to attach and detach without any soldering whatsoever. [Tom] needed to program a few dozen boards in a short amount of time, didn’t have any pogo pins, and didn’t want to solder a header to each board. The solution? Pull the pins out of a female header. It works in a pinch, but you probably want a better solution for a more permanent setup.

Half of building a PCB is getting parts and pinouts right. [Josef] is working on a tool to at least semi-automate the importing of pinout tables from datasheets into KiCad. This is a very, very hard problem, and if it’s half right half the time, that’s a tremendous accomplishment.

Last summer, [Voja] wrote something for the blog on building enclosures from FR4. Over on Hackaday.io he’s working on a project, and it’s time for that project to get an enclosure. The results are amazing and leave us wondering why we don’t see this technique more often.

Last saturday, Arte tvl aired a short documentary in french language about Arduino. The video was created by FUTURE magazine and featuring Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles and Arduino users: children and young electronics enthusiasts:

Tinkering in a garage on a drone, playing with a set of lights with LEDs or even build a robotic arm worthy of a science fiction movie … Today, even when one is a novice in electronics all this is possible through Arduino, a real flexible technology.

They also created two nice short info-animations to explain what is Arduino and the idea of open source:

Have a look at this wonderfully handcrafted 20-min webumentary about Arduino, made by Opificio Ciclope and produced by Wired Italia.

Nice format and nice look: good job.

The core of our story is the life of Massimo Banzi, and the region in which he was born: the Canavese area. In particular, the city of Ivrea, a veritable Mecca of Italian informatics, where Olivetti had its headquarters. The more we discovered their world, the more it became clear that this story was not only about silicon and circuits: it was about their shared excitement and their curiosity, like kids playing with their favorite toy.

(BTW, Massimo is not from Ivrea, but I guess Ivrea’s Mayor is going to give him and the Arduino Team the honorary citizenship)

via [Wired Italia]

E’ stato appena pubblicato il trailer del documentario che Wired Italia ha realizzato su Arduino. Il video per intero verrà rilasciato la prossima settimana.

source [Facebook]