Arduino: Blog

Thanks to everyone who RSVP’ed for the NYC meetup mentioned earlier. It will be at ITP on Saturday March 20 from noon to 6 PM.  There is no set agenda for the day, it’s simply an open meetup.  We want to meet  folks using Arduino.

We’ll also be meeting for drinks later that evening at a bar nearby, location TBA. So if you can’t make the meetup, come later for that. Watch this space for details.

We can accommodate about 100 people comfortably without disrupting student work on the floor. Based on the RSVPs we’ve gotten, we have slots for a couple dozen more. So if you’re interested and haven’t RSVP’ed, please send mail to team@arduino.cc. I’ll post again if we run out of room. Looking forward to meeting you all.

I was checking the statistics on the server this morning, when I discovered a couple of hundreds hits coming from a German illustrator (Johannes Kretzschmar) that posts his comics about technology in the form of a blog. Take a look at the one for today … one image sometimes counts more than 1000 words.

Arduino on Beetlebum.de, copyright by the author, 2010

For more illustrated fun, visit: Beetlebum.de

Europeans are used to the fact that we are a conglomerate of multiple cultures. This affects more or less everything, even the press. When it comes to the maker culture, the US has the advantage of having a single market, a single language, and a single culture. On the other hand, Elektor is a brand that has been since long time ago aware of the fact there are people who don’t speak multiple languages (like e.g. English). Therefore their magazine has been published in different languages in different countries since as far as I can remember. At some point I was collecting it in Dutch, German, English and Spanish. You could find the January article on ARM from the Spanish issue, in the Februrary Dutch one, or in the May German one … and vice-versa.

Cover

Page 12

Page 13

March 2010, Elektor’s English edition brings an article on 20 Open Source Tools. Arduino is featured as the first one of a series of tools that we all admire. It is really nice to be featured in Elektor (though I know it is not the first time, there have been several articles before where readers were using the Arduino board to develop their projects). This same issue brings a very interesting article titled Small & Open Source embedded operating systems that can run on AVR … this means you could probably run many of those small OS on one of the Arduino board models.

On January 1st, we announced that we’re working towards Arduino 1.0 (for details, see this post). Our goal is to stabilize the platform so that it’s supportable and a good foundation for future developments.

Metro Teknik 2010-02-17, cover, scanned by Mange

I thought the guys from Wired made me us look like crazy dudes in the pictures they took of us last year … but that photographer did a nice job compared to the photoshoped version of me coming out on this week’s Metro Teknik, the free paper about technology. The paper is featuring Arduino, and they took a couple of pictures here at my lab at K3. I am glad someone cares about our story and puts it into everyday people’s hands. The article is written in a language that is easy to understand and looks for examples of people working with Arduino at different levels. You can even see a how-to guide around the IDE … not bad at all … if it wasn’t for those pictures that make me look like the guy with the craziest hair-dude in the universe.

Metro Teknik 20100217, article, scanned by Mange

For being a Spaniard, this -my 10th- winter in Sweden is going to be hard to forget. It has been snowing like never before, I had to start wearing two pairs of socks, stopped having sugar in the coffee because of how much I would drink by the end of the day, couldn’t ride my bike to work for weeks …

Rumor says Linus Torvalds wrote his first Kernel during a very cold winter in Finland, making an analogy, we have spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting the website getting things done slowly, in the shadow. Some changes are more popular than others (I know some of you are not liking the forum’s layout) but we are not done yet. We need your comments to work this out. Jokes about how things look like are good, but much better is constructive criticism and proposals on how to make things better. thanks to all of you contributing in one way or the other.

We have a new collaborator -Davide Gomba- dedicated to clean up the spam and to try things out in the forum, among many other things. He has been with us for more than a week speeding up some of the very annoying tasks when running a website like Arduino’s. Please welcome him to our small family of  prototypers, you will meet him often.

Talking about speed, seems like the last two days things have gone slow in the server during US time. You should know we are monitoring this, it is something we haven’t seen before and we have our service provider -ServInt- looking at it together with us. We hope to have it solved during the weekend. If the error shows up today again, it should be quite simple to debug it. If not … we’ll have to wait until the next time it happens.

There are some other news:

* we included the service addthis for you to add any of the Arduino URLs to your favourite Social Network like Twitter, Facebook, you say it … there are over 200 different services within addthis

* we created friendly error messages for the site. Now if the server times out, you won’t get the white page any longer. It is not as cute as at some other websites, but we featured one of the oldest Arduino boards I could find in my drawer as the official “things are getting slow” picture

* the blog’s twitter module has been updated to the latest version, now it links won’t break the layout any longer, just look at the sidebar on the right

* the forum’s layout is being reworked, please be patient with us, we are going to make it easy to read

* in parallel and thanks to a very friendly French user (X. Hinault) we are going to prepare the new reference in French, I will be porting it to the official arduino.cc/fr soon.

And now, back to the hot pot of coffee.

Given the increasing numbers of boards and microcontrollers to which people have ported the Arduino core libraries, we wanted to make it easier to add third-party hardware to the Arduino development environment. The recently released Arduino 0018 (download) adds support for the installation of contributed cores and board definitions within the Arduino sketchbook folder. This saves you from having to dig around within the Arduino application as was required in previous versions and also ensures that the boards will remain when you upgrade to newer Arduino releases.

To install, simply place the third-party hardware folder in a sub-folder of the “hardware” folder of your sketchbook folder (see the instructions on the environment page). When you relaunch Arduino, the new boards will automatically appear in your Tools > Board menu and code will compile using their custom core libraries. To put together an installable platform for a particular hardware configuration, see the platforms page in the Arduino Google Code project.

This support isn’t perfect yet, but we hope it will make it easier to work with other hardware from within the Arduino development environment. If you have suggestions, please send them to the developers mailing list or post them in the Google Code issues list.

Are you into robotics? You should then take a look at the Galatea project by Francisco Javier Suvires. He has been working with this for some time, his original platform was not programmable from the Arduino IDE, but after a conversation at Campus Party 2009, he got convinced about the potential of using our IDE to create code for his machines. A bit more than a week ago he sent me this video:

You should check out the rest of his video material on Youtube and  visit his blog. He’s got quite a nice collection of robots both autonomous or remote-controlled.