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 31st. 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.
Sound Blocks is a tool to teach children and adults what sound is made of. The project was shortlisted in the Expression category of the IXDA Interaction Awards and it was developed by John Ferreira, Alejandra Molina, Andreas Refsgaard at the CIID using Arduino.
The device allows people to learn how, with a few parameters, it’s possible to create new sounds and, also, imitate real world sounds. Users can control waveform, sound decay or wave length and volume of three channels, all mixed together:
Sound blocks first and foremost was created as a tool to experiment with sound, it is playful and engaging.
Watch the video interview to discover more about the project and hear some noise:
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)
Thinkers and makers at Handsome created an automated Foosball Scoreboard using an Android tablet and Arduino Mega 2560:
the Arduino is responsible only for detecting a) a goal scored and b) the gate in which it was scored. After a goal is detected the Arduino sends this data to Android tablet.
You can explore the details of the project on this blog, the sketch on Github, and watch the video below:
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):
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
Today we are happy to release the Arduino IDE 1.6.8 and updated cores for almost all supported platforms (AVR 1.6.10, SAM 1.6.7, Curie 1.0.5).
This new version of Arduino Software adds support for scaling interface for UHD monitors: if the IDE is too small because your display resolution is very high or just because you want it bigger now you can set the scaling factor from the preferences panel:
Just uncheck the “Automatic” box, set the magnification to a suitable value and restart the IDE. Below you can see the “before” and “after” screenshot examples:
Another improvement is that the IDE now tries harder to remember the last window position when it’s closed and to restore it when it’s opened again. It’s a small improvement that should save some clicks every time the IDE is opened. (check Credits)
In collaboration with Intel we also released the new core, here are some of the updates:
we solved the upload problems encountered by some users on the 101 and we increased general upload speed.
the Arduino and Genuino 101 CurieIMU library is now reviewed, more usable and with many examples that show the features of the onboard sensor
we included new libraries for the Curie Core: CurieTimerOne: it’s now easier to play with Hardware Timers (for RTC functionality, instead, use CurieTime)
CurieEEPROM: use this library to simulate the non-volatile memory available on AVR cores.
CurieSoftwareSerial: the Curie version of the library allows you to create serial ports on (almost) any digital pin.
The complete changelog on the Intel core is available here.
We also included some frontend enhancement and improvements and, as usual, we made a lot of bug fixes, adjustments and fresh documentation thanks to the contribution of our community. 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.
Enjoy coding!
Our good friends over at Primo Toys have just launched their brand new Cubetto Playset and joined Arduino AtHeart program! Cubetto is a playful wooden robot that helps young children (3-6) discover programming through storytelling, adventure and collaboration. It’s the first coding toy of its kind to work without a screen or digital interface, and lets children learn to code before they can read or write. Cubetto is for boys and girls of any language anywhere in the world. It has been designed to help create a new, universal standard in tangible coding that will help will drive today’s coding revolution from the ground up.
The Cubetto Playset is exclusively available on Kickstarter for the discounted price of $149 until April 6th:
Part of the Arduino At Heart program, Cubetto provides gender-neutral play that boosts a child’s creativity, critical thinking, spatial awareness and communication skills. A beta version of the product, which raised over $80,000 (nearly £57,000) on Kickstarter in 2013, is used by more than 300 schools and 500 families in over 40 countries worldwide. Following years of testing and numerous iterations, Cubetto now boasts a learning platform that expands and connects to a limitless number of devices via Bluetooth.
RuntimeProject made a tutorial to create a little cellular automata on a small 126×64 OLED using Arduino Nano.
He worked on one type of cellular automata, the Game of Life by John Conway, which has a grid of cells each having 2 states True or False/on or off/alive or dead. These cells are governed by 2 simple rules:
Rule 1: A cell which is dead and is surrounded by exactly 3 alive cells, will be born
Rule 2: A cell which is alive and has either 3 or 2 alive cells will remain alive, else it dies
The Arduino-based Cellular Automata works using 2 libraries the, Adafruit GFX library to handle all graphics and text displayed on the OLED; Adafruit SSD1306 library which is the driver for the OLED.
Hernando Barragán is the grandfather of Arduino of whom you’ve never heard. And after years now of being basically silent on the issue of attribution, he’s decided to get some of his grudges off his chest and clear the air around Wiring and Arduino. It’s a long read, and at times a little bitter, but if you’ve been following the development of the Arduino vs Arduino debacle, it’s an important piece in the puzzle.
Wiring, in case you don’t know, is where digitalWrite() and company come from. Maybe even more importantly, Wiring basically incubated the idea of building a microcontroller-based hardware controller platform that was simple enough to program that it could be used by artists. Indeed, it was intended to be the physical counterpart to Processing, a visual programming language for art. We’ve always wondered about the relationship between Wiring and Arduino, and it’s good to hear the Wiring side of the story. (We actually interviewed Barragán earlier this year, and he asked that we hold off until he published his side of things on the web.)
The short version is that Arduino was basically a fork of the Wiring software, re-branded and running on a physical platform that borrowed a lot from the Wiring boards. Whether or not this is legal or even moral is not an issue — Wiring was developed fully open-source, both software and hardware, so it was Massimo Banzi’s to copy as much as anyone else’s. But given that Arduino started off as essentially a re-branded Wiring (with code ported to a trivially different microcontroller), you’d be forgiven for thinking that somewhat more acknowledgement than “derives from Wiring” was appropriate.
See what we mean?
The story of Arduino, from Barragán’s perspective, is actually a classic tragedy: student comes up with a really big idea, and one of his professors takes credit for it and runs with it.
This story begins in 2003 as Barragán was a Masters student at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy. He was advised and heavily influenced by Casey Reas, one of the two authors of Processing.
At the same time, Massimo Banzi is teaching a class in essentially microcontrollers-for-designers at Ivrea using a PIC-based board called the Programma2003 and a curious language that you’ve never heard of, “JAL: Just Another Language“. At the time, there was no GCC support for the PIC, so the choices for open-source development were few. Worse, most of the design students are using Macs, and JAL only compiles on Windows. It wasn’t user friendly.
Barragán’s thesis is a must-read if you want to know where Arduino comes from. The summary is everything you know now: it’d be revolutionary if one could make a hardware / software platform that were easy enough that artists and non-microcontroller-nerds could get into. This is exactly the revolution that was underway in the computer graphics front, powered by Processing. Make it open source and freely available, and you’ll take over the world. So he turned to the Atmel AVR chips, which had the GCC open-source toolchain behind it.
From Wiring to Arduino
So by 2004, Barragán had a few prototypes of Wiring boards out, and he and his fellow students were using them informally for projects. The GUI will look ridiculously familiar if you’ve used Processing or Arduino. Since the students were already familiar with Processing, it made a lot of sense to just clone it — with Casey Reas’ blessing of course. Barragán wrote a little program that maybe you’ve heard of: Blink.
Now Barragán needed a faculty advisor at Ivrea, and his interests clearly aligned best with Massimo Banzi. So with his thesis work well underway and Reas’ backing, Barragán took on Banzi as his advisor. With Banzi and three other faculty members, the Wiring platform got its first real test-run, the “Strangely Familiar” workshop and show (PDF). It was a stunning success — in the space of only four weeks students actually made stuff.
Massimo Banzi teaching class with Wiring
Barragán graduated in 2004 and moved back to Colombia. The success of “Strangely Familiar” lead Massimo Banzi to drop Programma2003 like a hot potato and teach his physical design classes using Wiring.
Work began on the Arduino project, according to Banzi, because he wanted a board that was cheaper to make than the Wiring board. So he replaced the ATmega128 microcontroller for a cheaper, smaller version, and chopped off everything that wasn’t “essential” from the Wiring board, like the power LED. This became the “Wiring Lite” board — and eventually the first Arduino prototype.
Giving Arduino its Due
It is not the case that Arduino doesn’t acknowledge Wiring at all. They do. There are a few sentences in the first paragraph of the Credits section of the website, as mentioned above. That and $4.50 will buy you a Grande, Quad, Nonfat, One-Pump, No-Whip, Mocha, but how much more can one ask for?
The Arduino project has been marketed with extreme savvy, something that cannot be said of Wiring. Banzi hooked up with influential people in the US, eventually friend-of-a-friending himself into contact with Dale Dougherty, who invented not just “Web 2.0” but also the “Maker Movement” and Make Magazine. Arduino and Make was a match made in heaven, and the rest is history.
But as mentioned at the top of the article, this is a classic tale of woe. Banzi had better connections and more marketing drive and skill. He pushed the exact same project — rebranded — a lot harder, better, and further than Barragán did, or probably could. Arduino is a household name simply for that reason. If Massimo Banzi hadn’t been behind the wheel, it’s unlikely that you’d be complaining about how many Wiring-based projects we feature.
And, being open-source software and hardware, Barragán gave away the shop. He probably (naïvely) expected to get more credit from his former advisor, or even get invited along on the ride. He asks why Arduino forked Wiring instead of continuing to work with him, and the answer is absolutely clear — Arduino was taking it for their own. And they could. It’s not nice, but that’s business.
Still, we feel Barragán’s pain. So we’re glad, after a decade of silence, that Barragán is speaking out on behalf of himself and Wiring, because it sets the record straight and because his project really was “Arduino” before there was an Arduino.
Casa Jasmina and FabLab Torino in partnership with Officine Arduino e Toolbox Coworking are hosting the IX° edition of the Share Prize, an international competition that promotes and supports contemporary art in the digital age .
The prize theme is ”House Guests” and focuses on the use of electronic art inside the private domestic space.
Share prize’s artistic director is Bruce Sterling, writer, journalist and critic of the new media. He invited two special guests to join the international jury: Cap. Samantha Cristoforetti and Paola Antonelli.
Captain Samantha Cristoforetti is the European Space Agency astronaut protagonist of Futura mission, the second long-duration mission ASI, engineer and design enthusiast. Paola Antonelli, is the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design as well as the Director of R&D at MoMA New York. Paola Antonelli was responsible for adding video games, the Arduino control board and innovative 3DPrinted objects to the NY MoMA’s permanent design collection.
The jury is then completed by Chiara Garibaldi, the SHARE Festival director, Jasmina Tesanovic, widely known as “the Jasmina of Casa Jasmina”.
On March 4th the Share jury will meet to select the entries for Share Festival and Samantha Cristoforetti and Paola Antonelli are going to give a public talk at Toolbox Coworking from h.17:30 to h.19:30 (CET). Stay tuned on our social channels for the live streaming link.
