Arduino: Blog

We’re very happy to announce an updated version of the Arduino Ethernet shield, with some nice new features. This revision incorporates a micro-SD card slot so you can store files to send over the network. It’s compatible with the Arduino Mega (using the SPI pins on the ICSP header). It adds a reset controller which should address the problems some people have had getting it to work directly on power-up. All-in-all, we think it’s a well-rounded upgrade to a useful product.

Full software support for these new features is under development. The shield works with the Ethernet library in Arduino 0018 on the Duemilanove. Mega support and a standalone SPI library are coming in Arduino 0019, which should be out later this week. The SD card can be read with existing libraries, e.g. beta-lib. We’re working on creating a version with a proper “Arduino” feel and documentation.

Just check the image that Rodrigo, at Laboral Centro de Arte sent to us today, 75.000 views of The Arduino Documentary trailer, after being featured on the main tech blogs on the internet!!

By the way, if you want to feature the guys who made the documentary, they are: Rodrigo Calvo Eguren y Raúl Díez Alaejos.

(cc) 2010, Laboral Centro de Arte and the authors

Neel Joshi, Sing Bing Kang, C. Lawrence Zitnick, and Richard Szeliski from Microsoft Research presented a paper at the SIGGRAPH 2010 conference in Los Angeles where they introduced image treatment algorithms using sensor information gathered by an Arduino board (3 gyroscopes and a 3 axis accelerometer) to compensate errors introduced while shooting a camera due to the movement of the capturing device. Their article can be downloaded directly from Microsoft Research’s website; you will find their PDF there, but also the slideshow they used to introduce their work, and some examples of the application of their correction algorithms to some pictures.

(c) 2010 Microsoft Research

As mentioned in this article at PC-Magazine, which was our source:

The four researchers named in the study managed to construct their hardware sensor package completely off-the-shelf, using a combination of one three-axis accelerometers, three gyroscopes, and a Bluetooth radio all wired to an open-source Arduino controller.

“Our method is completely automatic, handles per-pixel, spatially-varying blur, and out-performs the current leading image-based methods,” reads the accompanying paper.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses 6 [degrees-of-freedom] inertial sensors for dense, per-pixel spatially-varying image deblurring and the first work to gather dense ground-truth measurements for camera-shake blur.”

Laboral Centro de Arte, Spain, has commissioned the creation of a documentary about Arduino. The filmmakers are almost done with it and today they released the trailer to it. A lot of the footage was shot during the Arduino Uno meeting in March 2010, that took place at ITP, New York University.

TRAILER Arduino: The Documentary from gnd on Vimeo.

In the video you can see among others: Phil (Make, Adafruit), Zach (Makerbot), Alicia (Buglabs), Eric (ITP), Igor (Telefónica), Tom, Dave, Massimo, and David (me), as well as many Arduino ethusiasts, developers, and users.

The documentary is CC licensed, which means you guys can use it in class, public display, etc. The official release including the 45m TV version (with English and Spanish subtitles), the full interviews to all of us, videos taken at Makerbot, Adafruit, NYC Resistor, etc will be soon announced at the film’s website: arduinothedocumentary.org. If you want to volunteer making the subtitles in your own language, feel free to contact the guys behind it.

UPDATE: if you want to feature the guys who made the documentary, they are: Rodrigo Calvo Eguren y Raúl Díez Alaejos.

Last weeks Arduino was featured a couple of times on the online press. First we found it at this article by Chris Anderson at his website DIY-drones. There he talks about his visit to Smartprojects’ facilities close to Ivrea, Italy. For those not familiar with Smartprojects, it is the company manufacturing the Arduino USB (NG, Diecimila, Duemilanove), Arduino Mini, Arduino Mega, Arduino BT, and Arduino Serial, as well as a bunch of the official Shields. There is a nice collection of pictures showing all the steps in the process of making the boards, only missing images of the certification lab where the Arduino boards get the official CE and FCC labling. I think we never mentioned this before, but Gianluca partner in the business with Daniela, who has for the first time been featured as part of the process of making Arduino possible. Here a picture of  both of them holding some of the copper boards in the making:

(c) 2010 Chris Anderson, as seen at diydrones.com

Chris briefly mentions the release of Arduino 1.0, our IDE, puts a deadline on our release (you can see he talks about September this year, even if we haven’t really announced anything … yet), and shows a blurry picture of Gianluca’s desk with some prototypes of the boards-to-be. You can take that last picture from his blog and try to zoom in it if you want to … I doubt you will see anything that will let you foresee what we have in mind right now I guess this is just adding to the myth.

Here the picture for those of you that want to exercise your eyes and imagination:

(c) 2010 Chris Anderson, as seen at diydrones.com

Also from the Wired factory (Chris works there), Arduino was featured at this blog post where Phil Torrone (Senior Editor at Make Magazine, as well as partner of Adafruit) and Massimo get to explain why our platform is good for those that want to get started  in the world of embedded electronics. I want to close this post by quoting Massimo at that article:

“It’s cheap and open source with lots of documentation written in a not too technical language. Above all, it has a very welcoming attitude towards beginners and tries not to scare them too much.”

Read More

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/the-future-of-arduino

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/hardware-hobbyists-arduino

Over the past few years, the Arduino software has come a long way, in both features and robustness. There are a lot of little things, however, that we never really thought about or that we’d like to change. Arduino 1.0 is our chance to clean up these details and establish a stable platform for the future.

There’s a detailed list of the changes planned or considered for Arduino 1.0 on our development site (hosted by Google Code). The main items include:

Environment:

• New file extension to replace the .pde borrowed from Processing (issue #13).
• Redesigned toolbar icons (issue #291).
• Ability to upload sketches using an in-system programmer (ISP) from the IDE (issue #260).
• Simplifying the process of selecting your board and serial port (issues #223 and #257).
• Command-line compilation and uploading of sketches (issue #124).

Language (most of these are possibilities and still open for discussion):

• Creating events that can be called automatically, e.g. the serialEvent() as in Processing (issue #263).
• Adding specific functions for enabling / disabling the internal pullup resistors (issue #246).
• Modifying the behavior of print() on bytes (issue #284).
• Functions for accessing more of the low-level functionality of the hardware timers and other peripherals (issues #169 and #248).
• Optimizing the digitalWrite() function (issue #140).

Of course, we’ll continue to make improvements and additions to the software after Arduino 1.0, but that by making the incompatible changes together, we’ll make the transition clearer and easier. Once you’ve adopted your code to Arduino 1.0, it should continue to work going forward.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to respond here or to post on the individual items. Contributions are welcome; please sign up for the developers mailing list if you’re interested in working on the Arduino software.

Back in 2007 I had the chance to make a series of lectures with Casey Reas on the topic of open tools for design and art production. We toured 6 schools within the University of California in just 3 days. I prepared two lectures for this, the first one was called “High is Five” and the second “I hate robots”. The earlier was an attempt to explain my views on open hardware, while the second was just a collection of projects that had to do with electronics and were not robots.

Time has passed and now I am experiencing a counter-reaction. Since a month ago I am designing a low cost robot for the Spanish cultural centre in Mexico (more to come on this topic). But also I am starting to meet more and more people that see robots as a way of bringing kids into understanding electronics, as well as other science related topics. One of those is Eduardo Gallego, who runs the Complubot robotics studio in Madrid, Spain. He works with youngsters and has a pretty long history in the field of educational robots.

Among his achievements, his team has won for the third year in a row the Robot Soccer World Cup (at least one of the categories). Last time was in Singapore a couple of days ago. He has made a migration from other more expensive and hard to use tools, to run all the four competing robots using Arduino boards. He runs workshops for people interested in electronics and robotics and has made Arduino into his main tool for teaching. Check his educational robot here.

I must confess I had no idea about many of these things until I heard about the Robot Soccer World Cup. I am still not interested either in Soccer, nor Robots (or not industrial robots). But I see the potential of robotics in the same way Eduardo does. I believe there is a lot to do and getting things cheap is probably among the most important ones.

In the next two weeks, you can attend to one of Eduardo’s workshops in Madrid, or to my workshop in México, as long as you are not over 18

The Spanish Arduino community gathered on July 2nd at Medialab Prado in Madrid to share experiences. This first event was streamed live over the internet and was the chance for many of us to present what we are currently working with. You can take a look at the entry on Arduino’s Playground that documents the event, as well as watch the almost 1 1/2 hour long video that came out from the event (it’s in Spanish though).

I think we -the Spanish speaking community members- should all thank coleoptero (that’s his user name in the forum) for arranging the event. He had so much to do he didn’t even get the chance to present his own work. According to the Spanish email list, there is a possibility the next Arduino Barcamp will take place in Murcia. This would be a great chance to talk Arduino on the beach!

From the Arduino team we are happy to see how the community continues building new mechanisms for meeting and sharing. Let us know how we can support you with our servers, video/picture publishing accounts, etc.

Arduino is an open-source project and we’re happy that so many people have created variations on our hardware and software. We realize, however, that it’s sometimes hard to tell which products are part of the Arduino platform itself. The official boards are listed on the hardware page (and pictured above, with the exception of the official shields and Mini-USB adaptor). These are the products that we feel provide the best overall experience and utility to the Arduino community. They include boards from three manufacturers: SmartProjects (in Italy), SparkFun, and Gravitech (both in the US). These companies pay a licensing fee in exchange for support for these products in the Arduino software and documentation.

The official Arduino products are the only ones licensed to use the word “Arduino” in their name. Other products may be labelled as “Arduino-compatible” or “for Arduino”, but these are not a part of the platform itself and don’t fund continuing work on the project. If you’re making a product and wondering what to call it, we’ve added some guidelines to the FAQ. We think that these conventions make it easier for everyone to understand what products they’re buying and who supports them.

Finally, we’d like to thank a few companies that have been particularly good about working with us on these issues: Adafruit Industries, Oomlout, and SparkFun Electronics. Thanks for your cooperation and all the great products!

Every morning I revise the logs for what is happening at our servers, this helps me understanding which are the trends with Arduino, which are the countries generating the most traffic, or if got slashdotted. Today I manage to extract from the list that there was a hige amount of data being transferred in one single date to just one IP number back in the Netherlands.

When this happens, I usually make some further research, because I want to understand whether this was an attack or not. If it had been an attack, I would have shut down that IP number/range to avoid problems like we had in the past when our server wash actually forced to timeout up to 50% of the requests due to netbots trying to download our programs constantly.

However, this morning, there were no signs of attack, instead I found out some traces of an article that was linking to our website at a Dutch server. This is a very similar effect to the so-called Slashdot-effect. As most of you know, Slashdot is an online forum for community generated technews (or news that are interesting to tech dudes). The attention that website attracts is so huge, that in case an article makes it to their portal, the website being mentioned there will suffer the sweet death of the fame. You will get so much traffic, that your server will think it was a DoS attack and your sysadmin will probably shut you down -just like I do with the Arduino.cc website- temporarily.

Turns out, in this case, on July 4th, took place the Hack In The Box 2010 conference in Amsterdam. Niels Teusink talked about: Hacking wireless presenters with and Arduino and Metaspoilt. If you go check his article you will see how he carefully reversed engineered a logitech presentation device:

[...] abuse vulnerabilities in the product to get a Metasploit payload on to the PC of someone using a wireless presenter, by just sending keystrokes to it. This article describes how I did it and why you may be at risk if you use any wireless input device (such as a wireless mouse) [...]

[...] someone in the audience [could] send a ‘next slide’ command to the dongle in order to go to the next slide before I wanted to do so? Or worse: could he send random keystrokes to my laptop (after all, the device is a keyboard!). Wouldn’t it be fun if you could make a random message appear on Steve Jobs’ (or Steve Ballmer’s) screen when he’s giving his latest keynote? Needless to say doing so may be a criminal offence in your country.

Everything you need is an Arduino board (here the link that generated so much traffic to our website) and a 30Eur wireless module. The article describes in a very nice way how to reverse engineer one of this weireless presenters step by step. It is very informative and will open the door to some other Arduino-related hacking around there.

You could visit the author’s website here, and download his slideshow here.

Also at that conference Arduino interested people created an Arduino Village, yet another reason to get this many page requests in such a short time:

HITBSecConf2010 – Amsterdam will also feature a two-man team based Capture The Flag Live Hacking competition, an Arduino Village, a Hackerspaces Village (with participation from spaces in Utrecht, Den Haag, Brussels, Paris, Vienna and our very own Hackerspace Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia!) In addition to the above, members from TOOOL.nl will be on hand conducting a lock picking village and a hands on lock picking lab as well.