We’ve been waiting for this moment for months and today we confirm that Arduino Zero will be available for purchase from the Arduino Store in US on Monday June 15th at  $49.90.

At the same time we are going to release Arduino IDE 1.6.5 with a bunch of new features and the support for the Arduino Zero. The new IDE keeps the serial monitor open while uploading, lists the last 5 opened sketches in the “Open Recent” menu, and many other features you’ll discover next week.

Our team stumbled upon a last minute software bug which moved the launch date by a bit  but everything is almost ready, they really worked hard to ensure the best experience of use.

We love this product as it shows our great collaboration with Atmel, and we know a lot of people in the Arduino community are looking forward to put their hands on it.

Stay tuned!

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.

Comelicottero is a quadcopter based on Arduino Yún created during the Master in Computer Science at the Universita’ degli Studi of Milan (Italy) by Simone Castellani, Giovanni Intorre and Andrea Toscano:

The idea was to build a drone able to be controlled through WiFi from any PC, tablet or smartphone . Comelicottero is equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope for the stability obtained by a PID-based control system. Since Servo library is too slow for the quadcopter dynamics, an hardware PWM was implemented to obtain a 400Hz PWM signal.

The communication between the ground station on a PC and the quadcopter relies on WiFi and, in order to get better results, Bridge library was replaced with an efficient python script on OpenWRT-Yun. On top of that all the code was written to maximise Arduino Yún capabilities. The Navigation System has been designed, simulated on PC, implemented and tested. The autonomous navigation is going through an additional testing due to magnetometer interferences with motors’ magnetic field.

The user can control and monitor data coming from the drone using a gamepad attached to a laptop with a custom software installed.

The sketch and all the documentation will be soon available on GitHub and released with GNU license. In the meanwhile follow their Youtube Channel for updates.

Creative Mornings is a series of talks given by creative types all over the world and recorded for everyone to see online.

Last May, 22-year-old Nerea de la Riva Iriepa, one of the worlds most promising young talents in Robotics gave an inspiring talk about her journey in the world of robotics, her discovery of Arduino, how to work in team and also how to deal with a male-dominated robot world.

She is currently student of Electronic Communications at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and also an intern at Arduino in Malmö where she is creating educational content for beginners and finding ways to make coding easier for young users.

Casa Jasmina, Torino’s Open-Source Connected Apartment, opens its doors on Saturday during Mini Maker Faire in Torino. The unique example of connected apartment with open-source ideals, promoted by Arduino and curated by the futurist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, is hosted by Toolbox Coworking in a old industrial building already shared by Officine Arduino (the Italian Arduino headquarter), and Fablab Torino.

During the opening, Casa Jasmina will be available publicly for the first time, hosting some local Maker furnitures, an Italian selection of Valcucine kitchen appliances, household works by International Open Source designers (OpenDesk, Jesse Howard, Aker, Open Structure), and a small display of various connected objects and artifacts from the Energy@Home consortium, Torino Share Festival, and designs and prototypes from the first Casa Jasmina “Call for Projects”.

In the forthcoming months, Casa Jasmina will host residency programs, workshops and talks. This “house of the future” is not restricted to technicians but is meant for people interested in everyday life under near-future conditions and will be available on AirBnB for futurist weekends in Torino.

During the day at the Faire from 10am to 7pm,  you can explore over 50  makers’ projects, listen to many talks and  to the presentation of Casa Jasmina project by Bruce Sterling, enjoy a kids’ area with activities and a lab for the little ones.

Casa Jasmina  guided tours are starting from 11.30 am. Check the program.

Yes, we made it! You have some more days to complete your application for Maker Faire Rome – The European edition, and be with us next October. So far, we received many interesting, challenging, surprising projects and we don’t want to miss yours: defeat the procrastinator hiding in you and submit you project now!

Projects will be selected by a jury and will participate free of charge. If your project is accepted:

• you can exhibit your project: we’ll give you for free a booth with table and chairs inside the halls, which will be filled with visitors who are curious and interested in meeting you
• you can make a presentation in public: we’ll give you for free a room or a stage where you can talk about your project or tell your story or deal with the issues that you want to propose
• you can hold a workshop: we’ll give you for free a workshop area where you can do interactive demonstrations and engage participants -adults and / or children- in practical activities
• you can perform in public: we’ll give you for free a space or a stage  to perform in your
  creative, technological, robotic, musical, pyrotechnic performance.

We are happy to announce Tsunami by Arachnid Labs has joined the Arduino At Heart Program.

Tsunami is a new powerful and flexible signal generator built on the Arduino platform and the best way to get started experimenting with analog signals.

Nick Johnson, its creator, took the versatile processor behind the Arduino Leonardo, and combined it with a Direct Digital Synthesis chip, which makes generating analog signals incredibly straightforward. He also added flexible input and output circuitry, an easy to use software library, to make working with analog signals as easy as blinking an LED.

Tsunami lowers the barriers to making music, sending and receiving data, experimenting amateur radio, and creating educational applications. It was launched successfully on KickStarter last April and you are in time to pre-order it on Crowd Supply!

Here’s a list of projects you could do:

•  Use it as a building block for a synthesizer
• Measure unknown signals
• Measure the response curve of your audio amplifier
• Implement an APRS modem
• Generate precise clocks for other devices
• Make a digital theremin
• Read and write data tapes from classic computers (Commodore, Atari, etc)
• Test filters and reactive components (capacitors, inductors, and so forth)
• Encode and decode your own data for audio transmission
• Teach yourself about Direct Digital Synthesis
• Teach yourself about AC and complex impedance
• Make your own low frequency radio transmitter

Want to know more? Meet Nick and Tsunami in this video:

Cubled is an interactive installation made of 27 luminous spheres arranged in space to create a cube 5 mt (16.4ft) per side floating on a stage.

The project created by Giuseppe Acito of Opificio Sonico  has a structure made of steel wires, RGB LED Strips and Ikea paper lanterns.

The system is MIDI-controlled, the notes generated by a sequencer are converted to electric signals using an Arduino UNO and a Mosfet:

No DMX device was used for this system which is 12V DC powered, with slim electric wires in order to give the lightness needed to this installation. In this clip, the performance is splitted in 2 parts: in the first a kit of electronic percussion is “played” live by a step sequencer named Sonic Fraction Beatdown (a Max\MSP device for Ableton Live), the combinations of 12 MIDI notes generated are linked to the spheres. In the second part the combinations of sounds and lights are pre-programmed patterns clip and performed live by a Tenori-on Yamaha and Ableton Live. The installation was mounted inside the Link Club (Bologna – Italy) in December 2013, which hosted some world-famous DJ set, during a month of permanence.

Thursday May 28th at noon The Computer History Museum is hosting an open lecture by Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project. He will cover the historical origins of Arduino, including discussion of the process of designing tools which make digital technology accessible to people who are not experts, and the essential role of the larger Arduino ecosystem that supports this remarkable computer platform.

The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View (California), is a nonprofit organization  exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society in the last 40 years. The Museum is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computer history, it hosts the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world and many virtual exhibition you can explore directly online.

If you like vintage images and history of computing, check the “visible storage” collection below.

The main image of this post is a picture by Massimo Banzi showing the first useable Arduino prototype. Still called “Wiring Lite”, used as a low cost module for wiring users. David Cuartielles joined at this point (the flying resistor is his first contribution to the design) from this point on the project becomes Arduino. 

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.