Moodbox is a musical device created by a group of students (Iskra Uscumlic, Cyrus Kamath, Luca Mustacchi, Dario Loerke) to explore how we might set the mood in a studio space through music. They created it using Genuino Uno during the Interaction Design Programme at CIID with the help of Massimo Banzi and Dario Buzzini.

Moodbox enables you to set the perfect ambience and trigger different emotions:

Taking inspiration from the classic bar jukebox and its ability to influence the mood, we recognized that music and the atmosphere created by it are inextricably linked. When selecting a song to play in a social setting there is always a sense of negotiation involved. The person choosing has to consider the environment, the people around them, the current mood and that they would like to create.

With this in mind we set out to explore new opportunities for interaction in the communal space, using the environment of the studio as the setting.

As you can see in the video above, you can adjust the vibe of any space using four scales of emotions – from love to kill, serious to fun, chill to hype and dreamy to focus:

Emotions may be combined and fine-tuned with retro-style rotary knobs to dial-in feelings and get the perfect song choice. Like a jukebox, songs are queued once the selection is made. To provide visual feedback, lights also respond to the changes in mood, enhancing the overall influence on the space.

Moodbox connects to your iTunes account, with the rotary knobs sending information via a Genuino Uno and JavaScript to sort through a playlist. Our custom emotional algorithm then picks the right song and triggers mood lighting depending on the selection.

Last friday in Rome during the press conference of Maker Faire Rome 4th edition, Riccardo Luna together with Massimo Banzi announced that next October the event is going to become “better, bigger and stronger”.
A new location by Fiera di Roma building will host six pavilions in an area of over 100.000 sq.m. for makers, visitors, conferences, seminars and workshops. The event promoted by the Rome Chamber of Commerce and powered by its Innovation Unit “AssetCamera “ is once more curated by Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder, along with Riccardo Luna, Italian Digital Champion.

The topics featured at Maker Faire Rome 2016 are going to be home automation, re-use, drones and robots, 3D printing, digital manufacturing, industry 4.0, IoT – Internet of things, mobility, safety & security, food , fashion, music and especially Food & Nutrition.Together with the Future Food Institute (FFI), trust voted to food and innovation, Maker Faire will focus on the intersection between food and technology and will deepen the relationship between nutrition, health & wellbeing. The “Call 4 Makers” 2016 will open on April 18th and will close on June 5th.

Maker Faire Rome is also looking for amazing project with a “Call for BigBang Projects”  open until March 31^st.  The call will consider large-scale, entertaining, high impact, interactive projects. Installations and performances proposals will be welcome, too. The goal is to create the most immersive scenery one could dream of for a Faire of such character.

In the meanwhile take a look at the European Maker Week, an entire week of makers’ events, from May 30th to June 5th,  promoted by The European Commission and implemented by Maker Faire Rome in collaboration with Startup Europe, the event:

aims to draw European citizens to the “Maker world” thanks to the aid of Fablabs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and the hardware startups environment. The goals of European Maker Week are two folds: create awareness about the importance of the maker culture to foster an education of creativity and innovation in all schools across Europe; build bridges between local authorities and media and the main players of their own local makers ecosystems. It is of particularly importance to reach out to new players (e.g. Schools) who have never organized a maker event before.

Join us for the Arduino Day event organized by our team at the Jacobs Institute on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley with the participation of Massimo Banzi, David Mellis and Tom Igoe.

We are seeking volunteers to assist us during the event. We are going to have free workshops, talks by the founders, and art and tech displays.

We are looking for volunteer assistance during the event e.g. staffing information tables and displays, bringing a project to demo, helping during workshops, picking up coffee & lunch, and providing technical assistance. This is not a paid gig, but to show our appreciation that you are spending your time with us, Arduino has prepared a small gift for you.

We welcome all levels of skills and curiosity. More important than your technical skills are your people skills. Please provide us with basic information about yourself and your interests. Use the appropriate form depending on whether you have volunteered with us in the past:

First time volunteers? Please fill out this form. If you have volunteered for Arduino before, please contact us at arduinovolunteer [at] gmail.com.

We also have two paid positions: one for a two-person video camera crew and the other for a photographer. To apply, please fill out this form.

When: April 2nd, 2016
Location: University of California Berkeley at Jacobs Institute – 2530 Ridge Rd, Berkeley, CA 94709
Website: http://jacobsinstitute.berkeley.edu/
Arduino Day website: https://day.arduino.cc
Staff: Judy A. Castro (Event Manager), Michael Shiloh (Educator)

Arduino Day’s events’ map is updating constantly with new events created by local communities worldwide. The participation is open to anyone who wants to celebrate Arduino, Genuino and all the amazing things that have been done (or can be done!) with them and the community of open source enthusiasts. The call for submission is now extended and open until March 15th! We’ve already received 280 submissions from more than 55 countries! Celebrate with us and add your local event  now on day.arduino.cc.

If you want to attend one of the events near your town,  check the map on the Arduino Day website and remember that this year we are also celebrating Genuino, Arduino’s sister brand for products sold outside of USA. US-based events will be called ’Arduino Day’, while events based outside the US will be called ’Genuino Day’.

Some days ago Massimo Banzi and his team announced that the third edition of Arduino Day organized directly by the Arduino team will take place on Saturday April 2nd 2016 in Berkeley (CA) at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, University of California with Massimo Banzi, Tom Igoe and David Mellis.

“We’re really excited to express our love for open source – said Massimo Banzi, CEO at Arduino – in a day of celebration of our amazing community of makers, developers and partners. 6 million downloads of the Arduino Development Environment in the last year alone show the sheer size of our community.”

This is the draft agenda of the event (registration form coming soon):

– 11 am – 6 pm: exhibition of Arduino projects
– 12 pm – 4 pm : hands-on activities
– 3 pm -5.30 pm : Arduino co-founders  presentations

• David Mellis  “Makers and machine learning: a system for analysis of real-time sensor data”
• Tom Igoe “Talk Making amazing things talk”
• Massimo Banzi “IoT and the connected objects”

“I’m also excited” – said David Mellis, Arduino co-founder – “to hold an Arduino Day at UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute because they both represent a playful and innovative approach to design and engineering. I’m looking forward to seeing all the amazing things that people here at Berkeley have been building with Arduino. I’m also hoping that Arduino Day will be a chance to connect makers on campus with those in the broader community.”

 David Cuartielles will be in Mexico City to take part to Genuino Day organized by Hacedores at Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City.

Share your pictures, comments and news on your social channels using Hashtag: #ArduinoD16

Fab Academy is a distributed educational model directed by Neil Gershenfeld from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. Students view and participate in global lectures broadcasted every week and on February 1st Massimo Banzi was invited to give a lecture to an audience of  students from all over the world. You can watch the 50-minute recorded lesson in the video below:

Good news everyone. Due to many requests from our community we agreed to extend the contest to January 31st 2016.

You have some more days to submit your ideas to the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge,  win one of the one thousand Arduino and Genuino MKR1000 and a fully-funded (up to $1,500) trip to Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York, Bay Area or Rome; a chance to present your creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino & Genuino booths; a professional video production of you and your creation; and a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

Watch Massimo Banzi’s video presenting the contest.

Keep dreaming new ideas and have fun!

Rebel Geeks is a seven-part series on Al Jazeera English channel, featuring profiles of people around the world challenging power structures and offering a different vision of our technological future.

During Makers Faire in Shenzhen, in southeastern China, the authors of the series met Massimo Banzi and produced‘ Meet Your Maker’, a video interview about Arduino and how thousands of people are adopting it to build everything from 3D printers to drones, smart home devices to robotics.

‘Meet Your Maker’ can be seen on Al Jazeera English from November 16 at 22.30GMT. 

Watch the trailer and read the article now.

Last June Arduino partnered with Seeedstudio to manufacture Genuino boards for the chinese market and during Maker Faire Rome Massimo Banzi took part to an interesting panel to promote  4 chinese delegates from business, education, design and research domains presenting their work and discussing what does it mean to be a maker in China. (in the pic from left to right, Lin, Massimo, Alessio, Jin, Chenille & Flamingo).

The panel titled Making beyond the Wall and moderated by Alessio Jacona tried to address the growing maker movement in China which is not so visible to the European community while the hype of manufacture in Shenzhen, the Chinese Silicon Valley, is gaining more and more international media attention.

Flamingo was the first presenter of the session. Indeed he was also the first person to use Arduino boards in China back in 2007. As an evangelist, he taught physical interactions in China Central Academy of Fine Arts and even started the digital firm K1ND Beijing with Ogilvy China, which focus on interactive design with open source technologies for business projects.

He introduced LightBot (watch video on youku) made in collaboration with Jun Huang, an architect based in China. It’s an installation using LEDs as a brush to draw on light-sensitive canvas. The material on the wall glows after being exposed to light, particularly ultraviolet light, and fades away after some time. Lightbox is powered by an Arduino controlling 1024 LED lights installed on the pallet and stepper motors to control the movement.

Then it was the turn for  Jin  introducing Minibuilder and Candy Project (we featured her work in our blog earlier) created during her fellowship at Iaac. With her international background, Jin explained how she realized how the culture of making in China is focusing more on hardware startups with strong potential to accelerate thanks to great manufacturing opportunities. Whereas in the West, people see it more as a hobby or prefer to explore the conceptual development in a lab environment.  Nowadays she is implementing a new VR projects in China.

Later Lin explained his work as a tutor at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing and also his commitment as a community manager of mechanics and robotics in arduino.cn forum, the community of Arduino fans who also participated to Arduino Day. He worked on various projects and applied Arduino in hemiplegia rehabilitation equipment through sensor feedback and in a gearbox to detect malfunctions through vibration, temperature and stress.

Last but not least, Chenille talked about how he wrote the first book about Arduino in China and more recently, translated the third edition of Getting started with Arduino book into Chinese. He’s now working on a brainwave-controlled music player.

The panel was a good chance to present to an european crowd real experiences from the voice of chinese makers and sharing good practices for future collaborations.

Are you based in China and  want to share a project made with an Arduino or Genuino board? Submit it to the blog, we’d like to feature it and tell your story!

Last weekend we were in Rome to take part to the third edition of Maker Faire Rome. With more than 100.000 participants, the event confirmed itself as the biggest Maker Faire outside of US. We thank you all for visiting our booth and express your support to Arduino.cc community.

On Saturday we had a special announcement to make, Intel and Massimo Banzi were on the main stage presenting the collaboration on the Arduino 101 and Genuino 101:

During the three days makers, designers, kids and parents, and many more visited the Genuino Booth and the Maker Store to see the new Arduino’s sister brand Genuino boards, explore the interactive installations and chat with the Arduino team:

Massimo Banzi met  many fans and took part to a lot of selfies :

Explore the gallery of all pictures on Arduino account on Flickr. And see you at Maker Faire Rome 2016!

From October 16th to 18th, most of us will be participating to the third edition of Maker Faire Rome. We’re setting up an amazing booth showcasing Genuino boards, Arduino Create, Casa Jasmina installations, educational projects from Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC), the new Genuino Starter Kit and much more!

We’ll be at Maker Faire Rome all three days at our new Genuino booth, right next to the Maker Store where, for the first time, you’ll be able to purchase Genuino Uno and Genuino Mega!

Take a look at the map below to see where we are (in front of Pavillion U) and click on it if you want to download a PDF version.

Here’s a little preview of what’s new at our booth:

Genuino Modules
The Genuino Modules aim at providing the user a breadboard-less experience in building interactive electronic systems. The family of products contains a Hub, a Shield and umpteen number of individual modules. The Hub is a microcontroller board by itself, based on the ATmega32u4. The Shield is an add-on board that can be mounted onto another board (like Uno). The modules can be used by connecting them directly to the Hub, or to another Genuino or Arduino board using the Shield.

Eslov
The Eslov project is Genuino’s open-source, smart modular development platform made of a hub that connects to a computer, and a series of smart blocks. Each block features different functions, from analog sensors (like LDRs or potentiometers), to gyroscopes, accelerometers or even digital servo motors.
The different blocks automatically identify themselves in the Visual IDE when plugged to their hub. You can then virtually connect the blocks to one another by drawing pipes between sensor and actuator blocks. Without programming a single line of code, it’s possible to build complex prototypes like a seismic detector, a pet tracking device, or your own fitness band. Each block comes with a default firmware ready to run as part of the Eslov platform, but it is also possible to use it in combination with any of the existing Genuino or Arduino boards as a smart device connected via I2C.

Arduino Create 
Arduino Create is a platform that simplifies making a project as a whole, without having to switch between many different tools to manage the various aspects of whatever you are making.
You can write code and upload sketches to any Arduino & Genuino board directly from the browser, store all your sketches online, and access them from any device. The web-based software (IDE) offered by the Arduino Create platform is always up-to-date, including the latest Libraries and Cores, without having to install anything. Boards around you are automatically available in one single dropdown. You can add Schematics and Layout PNGs to your sketches, so that you have in one place all the core elements of your project.

During the three days you can also play with some cool interactive installations, among which:

Colour Theremin
The theremin is a musical electronic instrument that plays monophonic melodies by hand gestures. In this version, Colour Theremin creates a color ‘symphony': its intensity and shade are controlled by the movements of hands. The installation is based on a FastLED library by Daniel Garcia and Mark Kriegsman and it’s running on a Genuino Uno, an LCD shield, two ultrasound sensors, one pot for speed and 122 WS2812b pixels.

(S)passoUno
A DIY Live Stop Motion Tool heavily based on the work of Alexandre Quessy’s ToonLoop (2009), edited and used in Arduino and Processing workshop by Davide Gomba and Mirco Piccin.
(S)passoUno offers the player the possiblity to easily create a custom animation positioning objects on a lasercut board. Add a frame by pressing the Big Red Button, erase the last frame by pressing the Big Black Button, choose a sequence, add colors, add symmetry effects and enjoy the result!

(s)passo uno

Ready to celebrate the maker movement with us? Add the following events to your agenda:

• Friday, 16th October at 11.00am - During the Opening Conference “Life with the Machines” taking place at Aula Magna of Sapienza, Massimo Banzi will have a keynote and an important announcement.
• Saturday 17th October at 4.30pm – Massimo Banzi and Bruce Sterling will talk about “Casa Jasmina, the IoT for real people” at Room 10 of the Maker Faire (check map above).

Share your pictures and thoughts on social media channels using the hashtag #MFR15 and #Genuino

Get your discounted ticket to Maker Faire Rome (promo valid until October 14th –  h.18).