Arduino: Blog

Ekstra Bladet is a Danish paper that has a quite large online version. This week they have a small online TV documentary about Arduino’s presence at the OSD conference in Copenhagen last week. We cannot embed their video in our site (they give no chance to do so) but visit this link to see it. If you watch the clip you will notice there is a Pong game made with a series of RGB LED matrixes by the guys at BSD-DK, as well as a whole display of different projects that can be made with Arduino … that was a nice job! For the next Open Source Days, please remember I live just across the Oresund, and send me an invitation, thanks

Arduino clip on Ekstra Bladet March 2010

AARL's Quiz for March 2010

The AARL is the US National Association for Amateur Radio with over 150.000 members. This month they published a Quiz on their website that included a question about the term “Arduino”. We have been getting some visits to our website from them during the last days. If you are into electronics in general and radio in particular, you should maybe take a look at their website. Here some facts:

By 1914, there were thousands of Amateur Radio operators–hams–in the United States. Hiram Percy Maxim, a leading Hartford, Connecticut, inventor and industrialist saw the need for an organization to band together this fledgling group of radio experimenters. In May 1914 he founded the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to meet that need.

Today ARRL, with approximately 157,000 members, is the largest organization of radio amateurs in the United States. The ARRL is a not-for-profit organization that:

• promotes interest in Amateur Radio communications and experimentation

   

• represents US radio amateurs in legislative matters, and

   

• maintains fraternalism and a high standard of conduct among Amateur Radio operators.

At ARRL headquarters in the Hartford suburb of Newington, a staff of 120 helps serve the needs of members. ARRL is also International Secretariat for the International Amateur Radio Union, which is made up of similar societies in 150 countries around the world.

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.