NYC Meetup filled up!
March 17th, 2010We’ve had an enthusiastic response to the NYC meetup this Saturday, and we’re filled up. We’ve got an RSVP list that matches the capacity of the space. Thanks to all who RSVP’ed, we look forward to seeing you Saturday. For those who didn’t RSVP in time, watch this space, and we’ll pick a bar for drinks that night and announce it soon.
Arduino on Ekstra Bladet Nationen.tv
March 13th, 2010Ekstra 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
The National Association for Amateur Radio (US)
March 13th, 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.
Arduino NYC Meetup — Update
March 10th, 2010Thanks 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.
Beetlebum about Arduino
March 9th, 2010I 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
Elektor talks about Arduino
March 3rd, 2010Europeans 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.
NYC meetup?
March 1st, 2010
Massimo, David, Tom, Gianluca and David are meeting up in New York City in mid-March, and we want to see you. We’re planning a get-together on March 20 with folks from the Arduino community. We hope to have a daytime meet-up to see each other’s work, trade tips on Arduino and talk about 1.0, and an evening of drinks somewhere as well.
In order to do that, we need a head count so we can pick a place. If you’re interested and can make it that day, email team@arduino.cc. When we have a general idea of how many people can make it, we’ll post a place and some details.
Arduino 1.0 Usage Survey
February 23rd, 2010On 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.
We’ve been getting good feedback from experienced developers through our developers list; from many users individually, both in person and in email; and in the Arduino forums. We want to make sure we get input from the whole Arduino community. This means we want to hear from users, teachers, designers, developers, tinkerers, distributors, and anyone else who uses Arduino. This means you.
There are a few ways you can let us know what you think:
* Please fill out the the Arduino Uno Punto Zero survey to let us know what you think of the current features of Arduino. It takes about five minutes. Even if you have nothing else to add, this will help give us a broad picture of Arduino use. Please share this widely with your friends, students, and anyone else you know who uses Arduino.
For those who want to discuss in more depth, there are a few venues:
Metro Teknik, Sweden
February 23rd, 2010
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