The biggest news coming out of Maker Faire Shenzhen, outside the size and intensity of the event itself, was the announcement made by Massimo Banzi that Arduino boards using the name Genuino will be made in China by Seeed Studio. There have been plenty of Arduino clones made in China that closely […]
The room was packed and carefully listening to Massimo’s keynote about latest development at Arduino during Maker Faire Bay Area 2015. Starting from core values of Arduino, its community and showing the work Arduino team is doing to bring benefits to it: it’s about creating open protocols, bridges and connections, to give more options to makers and allow them to port projects on what platform is more effective for the development of their ideas.
Arduino community is at the center of his message. It’s amazing how it has been growing a lot in the last 10 years and the impact of traffic and downloads of Arduino IDE gives us an idea of the importance of Arduino in the maker community.
In the last year more than 21.5 million visitors landed on Arduino.cc website and 65% were returning visitors with an average session of 6 minutes. An Arduino IDE is downloaded every 4.5 seconds and since March 10th we reached almost 1.4 million downloads.
That’s why Arduino is not only about boards. Arduino approach goes beyond hardware and commits to providing makers with a whole greater experience in creating projects and trying to improve the way people build with Arduino and other compatible boards.
This approach is represented in the improvement recently brought to the Arduino IDE but also developing web-based tools. That’s what goes especially into the new Arduino Create, now available in private beta. Massimo referred to it as the “Arduino Operating system”, because now makers can run Arduino on a bunch of different operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and translate a prototype into a finished product in a much easier way.
Going back to hardware, the moment arrived to give some news about where to buy Arduino.cc boards. After the announcement of the strategic manufacturing partnership with Adafruit for the US Market the audience burst into warm applause. Massimo then announced Arduino started a series of other partnerships to manufacture boards locally all over the world and make them available as soon as possible to makers and distributors.
At the beginning of July Arduino will celebrate Independence day as a bunch of classic Arduino and new boards will be available from Arduino stores and some distributors with the classic Arduino.cc brand in the US market and going into details with dates:
– Arduino WiFi Shield 101 from the 25th of June
– Arduino Yún Shield available from the 25th of June – Adding Arduino Yún capabilities to any Arduino.
– Arduino Zero available from the 9th of July
At the end of the keynote Massimo spent a few words regarding the European and rest of the world market, introducing to the audience a new sister brand. Now we all can say: welcome Genuino!
It is a play on the Italian word genuino that in english means genuine/authentic and will allow Arduino team to keep promoting a common approach within the open hardware and open source community providing genuine boards to all makers outside of the US.
DFRobot is a Shanghai-based open source hardware facilitator whose mission is to encourage people to develop their own products and simply enable more rapid project creation. We caught up with Hector Saldana of DFRobot to find out more about the company’s offerings. Saldana notes one of their main focuses of […]
DFRobot is a Shanghai-based open source hardware facilitator whose mission is to encourage people to develop their own products and simply enable more rapid project creation. We caught up with Hector Saldana of DFRobot to find out more about the company’s offerings. Saldana notes one of their main focuses of […]
The apparent lull on the Arduino front the last few weeks was just the calm before the storm that is the Bay Area Maker Faire (BAMF). Both companies claiming the Arduino name were there over the weekend, with news and new products in tow. Ironically, you could see from one booth straight over to the other. Small world.
Perhaps the biggest news from Arduino LLC is that hacker-friendly Adafruit is now going to be making officially-licensed boards in the US. Competing with this news, Arduino SRL brought its new boards, including the Yun Mini and ARM-powered Arduino M0. And [Massimo Banzi] and Arduino LLC seem to be taking an end-run around the Arduino SRL trademark by announcing the “Genuino” brand for European production. For all the details, read on!
The Adafruit Connection
As announced by [Massimo] in his “State of the Arduino” keynote speech at the BAMF, Arduino is licensing Adafruit to produce a range of the “most-requested” Arduino boards at their factory in New York. So those of you looking to support Arduino LLC with your purchases also get to help line [Ladyada]’s pockets at the same time. That’s a big win in our book.
Photo: Atmel
It’s not a complete surprise that Adafruit should get tapped as a US fab for Arduino.cc. They’ve been selling the boards and producing copious Arduino-related tutorials since their beginnings in 2005. More recently, Adafruit partnered with Arduino LLC to create the Gemma board, which is basically an ATTiny85-based Arduino-a-like in a tiny round, wearable-friendly board. (If you’re familiar with the Adafruit lineup, it’s essentially a Trinket in the round format of a LilyPad Arduino.)
Indeed, after the deal is done and the dust has settled, it’s a bit surprising to us that this hasn’t happened earlier, what with both Adafruit and Sparkfun producing licensed boards and Arduino LLC looking for new manufacturers. Anyway, good job Adafruit and Arduino (LLC)!
(New) Hardware from Arduino SRL
Arduino SRL had its Yun Mini, which is essentially a smaller version of the Yun — a mashup of an Arduino Leonardo with an OpenWRT-capable router chipset. We’ve reported on these previously but it’s fun to see them in the flesh.
The M0 is interesting. Before the troubles began, Arduino designed an ARM-M0+ based board with Atmel. Now Arduino LLC has it listed on their website as the Arduino Zero, but still hasn’t got any for sale yet. Arduino SRL has the boards on their website as the Arduino Zero Pro, with a different name, but is now touting this version as the “M0 Pro”. What’s in a name? Not much. The circuit layouts and parts appear identical.
The Portal Battle
Both of the Arduino companies are working on getting your Arduino development into “the cloud”. (Conscience compels us to note that “the cloud” is actually just other people’s computers.) Anyway, this essentially means new web-based and browser-based versions of the IDE that tie into web services. Interestingly enough, the two companies have different takes on what that entails.
According to their Maker Faire press release, Arduino SRL will be launching a web portal for makers to “promote and distribute their products” and share code and ideas. Located at my.arduino.org (which currently seems to be password-access only), the idea seems to be to create a mini-Tindie for Arduino-based products. This couples with their “Arduino IDE-alpha”, a JavaScript-based IDE that will run in the browser.
Meanwhile, Arduino LLC displayed previously announced their alternative development platform, Arduino Create. Arduino Create lets you write, compile and upload sketches “directly from the browser with the Arduino Web Editor”, and store your code in the “Arduino Cloud”. Arduino Create looks slick: certainly a lot better than the homely Java IDE that we’re all used to. It’s too early to tell what this “cloud” is all about, but it looks like it will include code sharing, schematic and wiring hookup storage, and easy sharing among users.
We already use blogs, Hackaday.io (shameless plug!), Github, and other “cloud” services to store our projects and code, so we’re not entirely sure what either of these portal offerings will bring to the table. It’s 2015, is anyone still hurting for project hosting space on the web?
Cynically, we note that both of these companies are in a battle to “own” the Arduino community and that getting people to host code and projects on their servers is an obvious strategy, and providing a web-based IDE to facilitate this capture is the tactic.
And before we leave “the cloud”, we should note that both Arduinos are late to the game. codebender has been around and programming Arduinos on the web since 2012.
New Names
Photo: Making Society
Finally, as if it weren’t bad enough with Arduino LLC and Arduino SRL, [Massimo Banzi] also announced that licensed boards for the European market will be sold under the new “Genuino”.
Actually, this is a pretty cagey maneuver, because it side-steps the European trademark issues (which [Massimo] referred to as “the bullsh*t” in his talk) and is a cute name to boot. “Genuine”, get it?
Our take? As [Massimo] almost said in this video interview with Make, “a rose by any name would smell as sweet.” If Arduino LLC loses the trademark lawsuit in Italy, they’ll not be allowed to sell boards using the “Arduino” name. The best way to limit the damage in the future is to make the switch now, while everyone is watching, and give the market time to adapt.
The Maker Faire Bay Area is celebrating 10 years of making! The weekend is starting and we’ll be there celebrating t0o. We invite makers, artists, designers, teachers, educators and passionate DIYers to visit our team at the Arduino booth (#2223) right next to Atmel! We’ll be showcasing cool demos of Arduino Create, Arduino Materia 101, Arduino at Heart Primo and you’ll be able to have a close look to some of the new boards like Arduino Gemma.
On Saturday at 12:30PM Massimo Banzi will be on the Center Stage for his traditional keynote on the State of Arduino. You are welcome to attend and learn about the latest developments in Arduino open-source microcontroller ecosystem.
On Saturday and Sunday May 2nd and 3rd we are travelling to France for Maker Faire Paris! You can find us in the Intel booth with demos around Arduino Uno, Zero, Yún and Casa Jasmina. We’ll also showcase some projects and tutorials made with Arduino Certified Intel Galileo Gen2 and Edison!
This edition will be held in Pavilion 6 of the exhibition center at Porte de Versailles. Come and share your ideas and open source projects with us and discover how many cool things you can do with Arduino!
The biggest news coming out of Maker Faire Shenzhen, outside the size and intensity of the event itself, was the announcement made by Massimo Banzi that Arduino boards using the name Genuino will be made in China by Seeed Studio. There have been plenty of Arduino clones made in China that closely […]
