Regardless of your budget, time and flair, there’s a perfect pick to put under your friends’ and relatives’ tree this year. We created a series of Gift Guides to help you be more relaxed and efficient in finding the best solution for all. You can check below and find out also some good news regarding free shipping (check at the end of the blogpost!)

Kids

Winter holidays and Christmas is the time most of the people focus on kids and family in the most broader sense. And never like today we have the chance to make a present and open up new worlds to the little ones.

Yes. I’m talking about the experience you have playing with littleBits Base Kit for the first time. It’s an excitement for electronics you can share with kids and teenagers also happening when playing with Bare Conductive Pen, Voltage Village  Glowing House or the TV-B-Gone Kit designed to shut off any TV. They are like an entire universe hiding into a game box!

Explore the gift guide dedicated to kids

IoT & Connectivity

IoT and connected devices  has absolutely exploded in the past year, so if you’ve got coders and startuppers on your gift list, these ideas could save your time. In this gift guide you’ll find a selected list for different tastes and for sure there’s something for everyone.

From the well known Arduino Yún to the Annikken Andee for Android  smartphones designed to make mobile integration simple, you can learn how to build Wireless Sensor Networks and test the power of Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy with Blend Micro.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to IoT

Home Lab

Some people say that in the future our homes will be fully automated, with refrigerators ordering your milk when it’s over, and other gizmos enabling the materialisation of a truly smart home. Is this what we want? Probably we’re not sure yet but there are a few tools  that you can buy for your house that will get you and your friends to feel like what it means to have a home lab.

Starting from a Materia 101 kit to 3d print cool decorations for Christmas and you can take your holiday time to build it with the help of some friends. Or use some quite days to dive in the world of electronics exploring Make Electronics book by Charles Platt or tinkering with some components you’ve never had time to explore like the Arduino Wireless SD Proto Shield or the Tinkerkit DMX Receiver .

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Home Lab

Fashion Tech

Fashion and tech are closer than ever these days. Textile sensors make every interactive project comfortable to wear and easy to prototype. Soft potentiometers, Textile push buttons, Stretch sensors connected to an Arduino Lilypad are the best components to explore this promising field. You can begin with the Open Softwear book 2nd edition plus the Easy Wearable Kit and then move forward with  yellow EL-Wires to brighten your winter. If you want to explore new approaches not related with electronics, then try  the DIY alternative to print fabrics using light with Lumi KIT Red or Blu.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Fashion

Arduino Store is now offering FREE SHIPPING to Europe via GLS for all orders over €100, below 3 Kg overall weight. GLS delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by Dec. 24th, we strongly advice you to place the order before Dec. 15th. Learn more about shipping

Are connected objects the next big thing? Will they really become part of our life?
Watch Massimo Banzi keynote at Maker Faire Rome – The European Edition to learn more about the Arduino approach to this topic:

Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi, announced at MakerCon the collaboration between the open-source microcontroller and futurist Bruce Sterling. The Open-Source Apartment will be located in Torino, near Arduino Italian headquarters and it will serve as a test ground for the latest developments from the open source community, being outfitted with furniture from OpenDesk and a variety of hardware creations.
Watch the video below and more details will be available during Maker Faire Rome:

The connected birdhouse is a project prototyped during a workshop ran by Massimo Banzi at Boisbuchet, last August in France. It was developed using Arduino Yùn, by Valentina Chinnici, who shared with us the project, and two other students taking part to  the week of learning-by-doing around the theme of  the Internet of Trees.

They redesigned a traditional object, a wooden birdhouse to be placed outdoor, and connected it to a lamp shaped like a nest, to be placed indoor:

The connected birdhouse was in fact an interactive object able to communicate to the nest/lamp the presence of a bird inside the house, and accordingly to a color coded signal was giving also some informations about the size of the bird itself. In the event of a bird entering into the house, the nest/lamp remotely controlled via WiFi by an Arduino Yùn, was turned on. The nest/lamp received the notification from the birdhouse translating it firstly with a rainbow effect. After few seconds the light changed according to the weight of the bird (green, yellow or red).

The LED strip used for the nest lamp was an Adafruit Neopixel strip controlled by an Arduino Yún.

On this blog you can find the sketch to make it work and create one yourself.

Next 21st of September Arduino Tour is finally landing in London for a one-day workshop, starting at 10am at The Maker Works London, UK. (max. 18 people).

This edition of the official Arduino workshop is focused on the world of the Internet of Things and will allow participants to experiment with a botanical kit including an Arduino YÚN, plants and sensors. The workshop teaches you how to turn your plants and virtually any object into connected, responsive elements using Arduino YÚN.

Arduino YÚN is the combination of a classic Arduino Leonardo and a small Linux computer, able to connect to a network or Internet via Ethernet or WiFi. Arduino boards are able to read inputs – light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or even a Twitter message – and turn it into an output – activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online.

Check the program and book your participation >>

Explore this tutorial  demonstrating how the Arduino Yún can be controlled from anywhere with any internet connected web browser. The solution is provided by Bo Peterson using the Yaler service which means that the Yún can be reached from any network without knowing the IP-address, and without any port forwarding on the router where the Yún is connected.

A common problem in home automation and internet of things applications is that it is difficult to reach devices connected behind wifi routers from the outside. There are different approaches to overcome this problem:

• Port forwarding and static ip addresses. This solution requires the user of the connected device to know how to configure a router and have access to router administration which is not always possible. A Yun tutorial with port forwarding is found here.
• Polling is a technique where the connected device at regular intervals checks with an external server if the device should take action. This solution requires no configuration of the router but it creates extra network traffic and response delays.
• A third way is to use WebSockets which is a way of providing real time full-duplex communication over TCP. Spacebrew is a good open source toolkit for connected devices using WebSockets. Autobahn is another infrastructure that can be used.
• Reverse HTTP is the solution that will be used in this tutorial. We will use Yaler which is an open source relay infrastructure that gives access to connected devices with very little configuration.

Follow the tutorial and get the code at this link.

Our friends at Temboo are releasing more cool stuff for your Internet of Everything. Here’s some news from their blog.

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Now you can connect even more Arduinos with the power of Temboo by simply flipping our IoT Mode on. This new feature opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the Internet of Things.

What is IoT mode, you ask?

It’s a new way to access our 2,000+ Choreos on any of your Arduino or Arduino-compatible boards. By just hitting a switch at the top right of any Choreo page, you “got the power” to call that Choreo with a sketch tailored specifically for the device you pick from our drop down menu. Previously, this feature was only available for the Yún, but now it is open to the larger Arduino family. All you have to do is select the type of shield your board uses and the code will generate accordingly.

So how do I begin using this amazing IoT feature?

Select a Choreo from our vast Library and turn on IoT Mode. In the example below, we chose the Data.gov API and the GetCensusIdByCoordinates Choreo. Data.gov is a cool way to access APIs from a number of US governmet agencies and to query government datasets, including the US Census!

The “Arduino” option encompasses compatible boards that lack the Yún’s built-in wifi capabilities, but can connect to the internet with a shield. Fill out your shield’s specifics when the popup appears and save for future use. Run your Choreo and scroll down to retrieve the code for the sketch, ready to be pasted into your Arduino IDE. You can even plug this into a sketch generated by our nifty Device Coder to start mixing and matching!

We are thrilled just thinking of all of the possibilities this unlocks for the Internet of Things. We want to hear all about what you cook up with this new capability, so if you are working on an interesting project, reach out to us at hey@temboo.com!

Find out more on their blog!

We’re happy to share with you the update of the Indiegogo campaign of the Arduino At Heart for home automation we presented some time ago. Ez Control goes wireless!

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We have been silent for most of the time of this campaign, but this doesn’t means that we were sleeping. Not at all!

We were listening and interacting. We have received your comments, we have followed the topic on Reddit, we have exchanged ideas with many of you and we spent all this time improving our product.

Some of you was concerned about the relay, maybe too small. Some other concern was related to the position of the temperature sensor, that could offer false reading caused by the heat from other components.

We have upgraded the relay with a new one, rated 5A, and we have also improved the physical insulation for the high voltage circuit. We have then improved the insulation of the temperature sensor.

Sure all interesting, but those where not the main doubts about our hardware.

The most requested upgrade was related to the connectivity.

Why in 2014 do we use wires?

We admit that going wireless it was in our plans for the future. We wanted to start with an easy to use board, affordable and based on well known technologies, open to most of the users.

Reading and listening all your comments, we have understood that we should change our plan, and we did it.

Yes! We spent the past month with design, engineering, prototyping and testing of the brand new and immediately available EZboard WiFi!

This means that every perk and everyone will receive NOT the old board based on the cables and 10Mbit Ethernet controller, but this new, fantastic, WiFi development board.

And the price will not change!!!

Andrea & the EZBoard team

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Read all the info on Indiegogo and support them now!

Read more on MAKE

It’s a pleasure to announce the latest development board, Arduino Zero, expanding the Arduino family by providing increased creative opportunities to the maker community.

Arduino and Atmel unveil the Arduino Zero, a simple and powerful 32-bit extension of the platform established by Arduino UNO. It aims to provide creative individuals with the potential to realize truly innovative ideas especially for smart IoT devices, wearable technology, high-tech automation, crazy robotics, and projects not yet imagined.

The board is powered by Atmel’s SAMD21 MCU, which features a 32-bit ARM Cortex® M0+ core and one of its most important feature is Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG), which provides a full debug interface without the need for additional hardware, significantly increasing the ease-of-use for software debugging. EDBG also supports a virtual COM port that can be used for device programming and traditional Arduino boot loader functionality.

Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder and CEO said:

“The flexible feature set enables endless project opportunities for devices and acts as a great educational tool for learning about 32-bit application development.”

Reza Kazerounian, senior vice president and general manager, microcontroller business unit at Atmel added:

“Leveraging more than 15 years of experience since the inception of AVR, simplicity and ease-of-use have been at the core of Atmel’s technology, Atmel is pleased to see the continued growth of the global maker community stemming from the increasing access and availability to open source platforms such as Arduino. We enable makers, but the power lies within the makers themselves.”

The first prototypes of Arduino Zero will be on display at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 in San Mateo on May 17 and 18 at the following booths:
Arduino Booth: #204
Atmel Booth: #205
ARM Booth: #405

See you there!