Arduino: Blog

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.

It’s been a month -almost- since I was posting anything to the blog. It has been a busy time looking through things in the server. The team is working hard preparing the NYU March meeting, as Massimo mentioned on the Uno Punto Zero post:

In march, during the NYU spring break, we’ll meet up at ITP in New York to exchange notes and test our assumptions followed by a social event somewhere in town (we’ll have more details about this as we are organising it right now)

Massimo coordinates the action, making sure the event will run smoothly, ITP -the school Tom teaches at- has approved the use of their facilities for the meeting, and we are now working with the specifics of who does what. There are at least two independent teams (one Italian and one Spanish) making video documentaries about Arduino and we hope they will make it to NY to interview both the team and the event participants. Massimo is also coordinating the press for the event, just drop us a line if you work for any kind of media and are interested in documenting the event. We will try to schedule you in somehow.

There has been a lot going on during the silent month. I think it is worth letting people know about it.

Arduino 0018

Dave released Arduino 0018 after a month-long testing process. This latest revision of the software is not just a bug-fix from 0017, but includes a lot of feedback from the developer’s list, as well as from the teacher’s one. Go here to download the latest IDE’s version.

I you want to influence Arduino’s IDE development, you should subscribe to one of those two (or both) discussion lists. There is really a lot of people participating of the creation of the next Arduino, but your opinions are for sure good for us to improve our software, hardware, and documentation materials.

Server operation

The Arduino server reached record levels in performance. We registered almost 14.000.000 hits (344.932 unique visitors) just by moving the downloads from our webserver to a second server. We upgraded to a new version of the OS and will upgrade the forum software. The forum searches are now operated by Google (who already had indexed everything) and the blog is always updated to the latest version.

There is still a list of things to be done, but with the server at its full power, things are much easier. Now we can concentrate in improving the wiki with some requests to make easier the making of new pages, create translations and so on. Give us your opinion of what should be made first on the forum.

Contests

Like every other month, one of our distributors comes out with a new contest to invite you guys to share your creations with others while getting a chance to get some free gear. This time, Libelium, one of Arduino’s distributors in Spain, is launching their 3rd Arduino contest. Last year the level went pretty high, I am looking forward to see this year’s outcome to this contest.

Events

One of the reasons I had no time to post on the blog during the last weeks is that I was teaching at Valencia’s Polytechnical University – Arts and Technology Master course (Spanish only). Valencia is one of those places known for being really touristic.

However, there is much more than sandals and sun-glasses in the city. I found out there is a collective dedicated to promote open culture that runs the Generatech events’ series. If you are interested in gender and technology, this is your place. You should take a look at their promotion video, but also these posters #1 y #2 (I am not posting them here because of their explicit content).

Press

The Swedish specialized press has finally discovered us. December’s edition of the magazine “Elektronik” , that is delivered free of charge to anyone that requests it inside Sweden, published a small note about Arduino and last week came out with an interview. Unfortunately it’s just in Swedish, but I think Google translate makes a nice job if you want to see what it says.

The migration took much less than expected, what considering we rehearsed it three times was not that strange. 12 hours after finishing the job my DNS in Sweden upgraded its registers and I could access the site again. I got happily surprised when Madworm (one of the Arduino users in forum) sent me this picture showing a performance test he ran on the new server which happens to be about a million times better than one he made about two months ago.

(c) 2010 Madworm, Arduino server performance test

These are good news, we are happy, I am happy. Also, if you are a webadmin and are interested in what we learned from this. Here our 50cents.

- our forum wasn’t really the problem until now, no matter how much load the performance tests were showing, we have been monitoring the website for months and the load on the forum -which is made in perl- was of about 3 requests/second, 5 at most … that is not enough to crash our server (not even the old one)

- our blog and wiki report maximum 20 to 30 requests per second, again … not really a problem

- the downloads from our server, which are reported as httpd processes, generate up to 500GB of hidden traffic in a month, they are up to 90 simultaneous processes, enough not to let the CPU have enough processing power to do anything else

We are going to test this extent by removing the downloads until the end of January to a different server. We like Googlecode and the service they provide us for the software releases, but we still want to have our own copy of our software and documentation for people to get directly from us. And just for the record, here some screenshots I took this morning while doing the doo.

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

(c) 2010 Arduino team, server migration process

Hej,

due to the OS migration in our servers, we invite you to stop posting -otherwise your information will get lost- in the following order:

- Friday Jan 8th, 13.00 CET: no more email to the email lists, the archives will be moved from then and on

- Saturday Jan 9th, 6.00 CET: no more posts to the blog, no more posts to the playground

Saturday at 8.00 CET we will activate the new DNS records what will take up to 48 hours to propagate over the whole internet. If when connecting to Arduino, you get the normal page, with no migration message on top of it, that means your computer is accessing the latest website and you can use the website as normal again.

steps for migrating to the new OS at Arduino.cc

We are going to run an upgrade of our servers from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5. During the next week we are going to be migrating the whole web, blog, forums, etc. The way to achieve this is creating a new IP range for our servers and move the whole content there. The web names will be kept the same.

In essence this should not affect the current web, nor will it improve the current functionality in any possible way. The servers will be online 100% and there will be a small temporal dis-adjustment due to the nature of the net. While all the DNS servers are updating to the new IP range, some of you will be seeing the old servers, while some others will be seeing the new ones. If there was about to be any downtime in the server, it would happen on January 10th, which is a Sunday, most likely nothing will happen.

The way we are going to cope with this is to freeze the forum and playground in the old server from January 10th 00:01 CET. At that time I will switch the DNS records, giving the whole system the Sunday to update. Worst case scenario some of you might not be able of posting anything to the forum or the playground until Monday January 11th. The website will work as normal, the email lists should do as well.

You might ask why we are doing this if it is not strictly needed. Arduino’s web development team is responsible for strategic planning on how to use the web for our project and, after studying the current use of the net and the possible new improvements, we have realized that sooner or later we would have to migrate to a better version of CentOS, which is the OS provided by our server provider. This will allow us creating new services, make better use of our processing power, and optimize our backups.

Talking about something else, there have been many requests for updating the forum. We are all for doing it, but first things first. Directly after fixing the server’s OS we will:

1) upgrade the forum’s software to the latest stable version,

2) make new templates for the forum to make it look like the rest of the website,

3) move the forum’s search function into Google to speed it up,

4) add some fancy web 2.0 functions to the forum like “twitter this” or “send this to my faceboook”

Dear Friends of Arduino

On the first day of 2010 we look back at five amazing years where Arduino has gone from being an idea into our heads to become a widely used platform for hardware learning and experimentation.

We set out to build a platform that helps people get stuff done without having too much focus on the technology used to get it done. We’re pleased to see many people have managed to do just that.

We have faced a happy challenge as the platform has seen more widespread use. We get more and more very qualified contributions and valuable suggestions from a many different sources. It is difficult to satisfy everyone while avoiding the platform bloat that we sought to avoid in our original goals. We believe we have been quite successful at keeping Arduino true to its roots, incorporating suggestions and contributions but still keeping it simple. Arduino has reached a reasonable level of stability and reliability, and it’s time to crystalise the work done so far and to graduate, as the title in Italian says, to 1.0

What does this mean for Arduino?

We plan to stabilise the API and the current IDE so that for the foreseeable future the reference, the examples, the tutorials and the books you buy should stay consistent. This will help people who are teaching, wiriting tutorials and books to stay up to date for longer. We will obviously fix bugs and add new boards to the core as they appear and you should expect everything in 1.0 onward to work properly.

At the same time this allows us to open up other streams for developing “experimental” distributions that are more cutting edge that are more appealing to people with more experience that are willing to trade some stability with more performance and new features.

The schedule for 1.0 release will be as follows: we’ll start a public discussion on the API for 1.0 which will last into February. At that time, we’ll summariseall the suggestions, and incorporate those that we consider coherent with the philosophy of simplicity and ease of use.

In march, during the NYU spring break, we’ll meet up at ITP in New York to exchange notes and test our assumptions followed by a social event somewhere in town (we’ll have more details about this as we are organising it right now)

We should expect to be able to go “Uno punto Zero” by June.

We also recognise that our website has been in need of love for quite a while and we have started working on a new infrastructure where we’ll better integrate its three main elements (Main site, forum and playground) both graphically and technically. A new forum platform is in the works as we try to find a solution that will let us migrate all the immensely valuable content of the current forum without losing a single bit of it.

The main website will become, in the long run, a much more general resource for people learning about Physical Computing and Arduino. There are some amazing tutorials on the playground and around the web, collecting and organising them will provide us with a great resource for learners and we hope to recognize those contributions by including more of them in the main site

Hardware-wise we’re working on some new ideas on how to make Arduino even simpler to use and more affordable. At the same time we’re looking at how, applying the Arduino Philosophy, we can make some other areas of technology more approachable for everybody.

Today everyone of us is working on their new years resolutions, these are ours and we hope you’ll be excited as we are to work on it.

Massimo on behalf of the Arduino team

Are you interested in Interaction Design? On December 10th, the Bachelor and Master students at K3, Malmo University will present their projects developed over the last couple of months. The prototyping teachers will also show off their creativity assembling a decomposed Xmass jukebox. Come and enjoy Glogg celebrating interaction design with us.

K3 Winter Show, 2009

The show will take place at K3’s new building at Ostra Varvsgatan 11. The building is called Kranen 2 (which means crane 2). Funny enough it has a boat inside and not a crane. Entrance is free. You are welcome from 13.00.

World Clock - winner of Instructables Arduino contest 2009

A couple of weeks ago we announced the Instructables Arduino contest, the results are now ready. The pretty World Clock won. I wonder if its maker will send me one this Xmass. The people at Instructables were overwhelmed with the response from the community. Believe me when I say there were a lot of entries, it was hard to be in the jury … the level in the projects presented got quite high.

I wish I had some time to join one of these contests myself. But … mm … it’s maybe better just being part of the jury, I don’t want to lose against you guys!

During Massimo’s course at CIID, the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, the students came out with the idea of making a cake resembling the IDE’s icon:

Arduino Cake at CIID

Massimo got extra happy that day, just take a look at this other picture (by the same author)

Massimo and the Arducake