The Open Hardware Summit 2015 will be held September 19th in Philadelphia, PA (USA). This event brings together the open hardware community for a day of talks on all aspects of open-source hardware. It’s an inspiring event and a great chance to connect with other open hardware practitioners. The summit is organized by the Open Source Hardware Association.

If you’d like to speak at the Summit, check out the call for submissions. You have until July 2nd to submit your proposal. Decisions on the schedule will be made by July 31st.

You can get your tickets for the Summit. Past years have sold out, so you may want to get them early.

If you’d like to sponsor the Summit, see the sponsorship details.

Marco Mauro is a physicist currently employed as Scientific Coordinator at Novaetech, the first Spin-off Company of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy. He shared with us all the info about a project he’s been working on  and based on Arduino Micro.

OpenQCM is a fully open source scientific microbalance capable of weighing mass deposition down to 1 billionth of gram:

The sensing core of the microbalance is a piezoelectric quartz crystal oscillator. The deposition of a very tiny mass on the surface causes the variation in the quartz frequency. openQCM belongs to a new generation of innovative smart sensor which boast high resolution and ultra high mass sensitivity. The open source strategy made the creation of openQCM available at low cost which represents a bit fraction of the cost of similar scientific products.

openQCM was built keeping in mind the emergent principles of the open source hardware movement. The open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology through the open exchange of all the project features, 3D design, electronics and software. The open hardware potentiality is even greater when it comes to hardware for scientific applications.

openQCM is exactly something like that, the first open hardware quartz crystal microbalance with applications in a wide range of scientific fields, such as chemical and biological sensing, material science.

openQCM has an Arduino Micro board inside at heart. By hacking the timer counter of the AtMega32U4 Arduino microcontroller, it is possible to measure the quartz crystal frequency variations using the 16 Mhz microprocessor clock. openQCM team has designed an Arduino Micro shield with an embedded quartz crystal oscillator driver circuit and a temperature sensor. The output of the quartz crystal oscillator driver is fed to the Arduino Micro timer counter and the analog value of the temperature sensor is fed to the analog pin of the board. This configuration allow you measure the quartz crystal frequency with a resolution of 1 Hz, which roughly corresponds to a mass resolution of 700 pg over the entire quartz surface in air.

One of the major challenge of an open hardware project is that such devices require funding to prototype and manufacture. That’s why the openQCM team have selected the 3d printing technology to keep high quality and low cost. Using 3d printing to print out the prototypes via the SLS process from OS Formiga P100, P110, P395, and P730, the openQCM team created the device’s parts, which required a precision down to 60 µm.

The open source concept made openQCM publicly available so that anyone (scientists, technology enthusiast, makers, hobbyist …) can study, modify, and develop the hardware based on the original design. openQCM is now working and ready to win the heart of the scientific community and more.

Go and make one yourself!

For anyone looking for a capable robotic arm for automation of an industrial process, education, or just a giant helping hand for a really big soldering project, most options available can easily break the bank. [Mads Hobye] and the rest of the folks at FabLab RUC have tackled this problem, and have come up with a very capable, inexpensive, and open-source industrial arm robot that can easily be made by anyone.

The robot itself is Arduino-based and has the option to attach any end effector that might be needed for a wide range of processes. The schematics for all of the parts are available on the project site along with all of the Arduino source code. [Mads Hobye] notes that they made this robot during a three-day sprint, so it shouldn’t take very long to get your own up and running. There’s even a virtual robot that can be downloaded and used with the regular robot code, which can be used for testing or for simply getting the feel for the robot without having to build it.

This is a great project, and since it’s open source it will be great for students, small businesses, and hobbyists alike. The option to attach any end effector is also a perk, and we might suggest trying out [Yale]’s tendon-driven robotic hand. Check after the break for a video of this awesome robot in action.

A new version of the Arduino IDE (1.6.1) is available at the download page!
A month ago we released the version 1.6.0 of the Arduino IDE. We then received lots of feedback: issues on Github, emails on the developers mailing list and, most important, forum messages. We fixed a lot of issues, here is a brief list:

• Better Yún discovery mechanism (thanks Ron Guest)
• Better SoftwareSerial library (thanks Matthijs Kooijman)
• Native dialogs on MacOSX on the Java 7+ experimental version
• Improved library name matching, so IRemote library won’t conflict with RobotIRremote library (thanks Paul Stoffregen)
• Fixed bug on Windows when attempting to open a sketch by double clicking it

As usual, the complete list of fixes and credits is available here.

Don’t forget to report any issue you find, either on Github or on the Arduino forum: your help is very much appreciated. It doesn’t matter if you are not a tech specialist: every feedback adds value.

We are already working on release 1.6.2, with some very useful features and user experience improvements. Stay tuned!

According to [Squonk42], nope. And we think he’s probably right.

The Yun is an Arduino Leonardo with an Atheros AR9331 WiFi SoC built in. It’s a great idea, pairing the Arduino with a tiny WiFi router that’s capable of running OpenWRT.  But how is this no longer Open Source Hardware? Try getting an editable board layout. You can’t.

Or at least [Squonk42] couldn’t. In Sept. 2013, [Squonk42] posted up on the Arduino forums requesting the schematics and editable design files for the Arduino Yun, and he still hasn’t received them or even a response.

Now this dude’s no slouch. He’s responsible for the most complete reverse-engineering of the TP-Link TL-WR703N pocket router, which is, not coincidentally, an Atheros AR9331-based reference design. And this is where the Arduini ran into trouble, [Squonk42] contends.

[Squonk42]’s hypothesis is that Arduino must have done what any “sane” engineer would do in this case when presented with a super-complex piece of hardware and a potentially tricky radio layout: just use the reference design (Atheros AP-121). That’s what everyone else in the industry did. And that’s smart, only the rest of the consumer electronics industry isn’t claiming to be Open Source Hardware while the reference design is protected by an NDA.

So it looks like Arduino’s hands are tied. They, or their partner Dog Hunter, either signed the NDA or downloaded the PDF of the reference design that’s floating around on the Interwebs. Either way, it’s going to be tough to publish the design files under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Is this a change of strategy for the Arduino folks or did they just make a mistake? We won’t know until they respond, and that answer’s a year and a half in coming. Let’s see what we can do about that. And who knows, maybe Arduino can lean on Atheros to open up their reference design? It’s already an open secret at best.

But before you go out lighting up your righteous Open Source Hardware pitchforks and sharpening up your torches, read through [Squonk42]’s case and then dig through the primary sources that he’s linked to make up your own mind. You’ll make your case more eloquently if you’re making it yourself.

Good luck, [Squonk42]! We hope you at least get your answer. Even if you already know it.

Using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to perform a task in the real world is certainly a project we’ve seen here before, and certainly most of these projects help to make up the nebulous “Internet of Things” that’s all the rage these days. Once in a while though, a project comes along that really catches our eye, as is the case with [Jamie’s] meticulously documented automatic garage door opener.

This garage door opener uses an ATMega328 to connect the internet to the garage door. A reed switch is installed which lets the device sense the position of the door, which is relayed back to the internet. [Jamie] wrote an Android app that can open and close the door and give the user the information on the door’s status. One really interesting feature is the ability to “crack” the garage door. This is done by triggering the garage door opener twice with a delay in between. From the video after the break we’d say this is how [Jamie’s] cat gets in and out.

We love seeing projects that are extremely well documented so that anyone who wants to make one can easily figure out how. Internet-connected garage door openers have been featured in other unique ways before too, but we’ve also seen ways to automatically open blinds or chicken coops!

Two days of workshop with Massimo Banzi visiting IDEO headquarters in Munich is scheduled for the 28th of February on the topic of smart homes and connected objects. Book your participation (max 20 participants)

The program starts with a brainstorming session, led by IDEO and Massimo Banzi, around Connected Objects and IoT. Then, participants will prototype an IoT device, with a kit that includes an Arduino YÚN and a selection of Tinkerkit sensors and actuators.

Read more about the  #ArduinoTour workshop

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:

Read more on MAKE

The fifth edition of the Open Hardware Summit, for the first time happening outside the USA, is taking place on the 30th of September 2014  in Rome (you can now book your free tickets here).The event launches the Rome Innovation Week, culminating with the second edition of Maker Faire Rome (3-5 October). 

The topic of this edition of the Summit wants to reflect on how production models are shifting from one to one, to one to many structure and the latest schedule features several outstanding speakers of the open hardware scene such as Adrian Bowyer (father of RepRap), Tomas Diez (Fab Lab Barcelona Director), Yasmin Elayat (GOOD fellow), Becky Stern (Director of Wearable Electronics, Adafruit Industries), Eric Pan (Founder, Seeed Studio, Forbes China’s 30 under 30), David Lang (OpenROV Founder, Author of Zero to Maker), Gawin Dapper (CTO, Phonebloks), Nick Ierodiaconou (Co-Founder Open Desk), Phoenix Perry (Founder, Code Liberation) and many more.

Check the Summit’s blog for features and updates about speakers.