Multi proyectos 0115

After a couple of years of prototypes, tests and announcements, finally we have produced an ethernet shield for Arduino. This module gives Arduino the ability to open connections to other Internet hosts or behave like a server, for example a simple web server.

We like this design because it uses the w5100 chip from WizNet that implements the whole IP stack in itself providing up to 4 sockets simultaneously.

I believe this will provide Arduino enthusiasts around the world with a platfrom that is initially simple to use but with room for growth as the knowledge of the user increases.

From the Internet of Things to the Internet of Arduinos, happy tinkering.

Documentation http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoEthernetShield
Guide http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/ArduinoEthernetShield

Was a short note on an article from P. Torrone from Make, but here it comes:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/10/24/0343244.shtml

The Arduino story has been written by Clive Thompson, one of the Wired Magazine reporters. Check the full story here. The article, titled “Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?“  reviews several hardware projects under the umbrella of the Open Source philosophy.

Arduino opens the story and includes probably the funkiest pictures ever taken on (some of) us. The online version shows a picture of the Diecimila board, together with some nice shots of related projects: WineM coaster, Snail Light Seeker, the interactive embroidery mentioned in this blog, and Botanicalls. Congratulations to all of you that got featured in the article.

picture of Wired Magazine article on Open Source Hardware, October 2008

Tom sent this picture of the printed article, both him and Dave are not in the pictures since they couldn’t come to Milano for the photo-shoot. Hopefully for the 10th anniversary we can all be there.

Tom also reported back from Maker Faire where he could get one of Massimo’s newly printed books. Seems like this should be marked as “Arduino’s week” in our calendar for the coming years. Since Tom didn’t make it to the pictures on Wired, I feel like I gotta post him while at MF.

picture of Tom Igoe, Maker Faire, October 2008

PS. Guys, this is a far as my imagination could go when it comes to being mentioned on print … well, this one and the British encyclopedia, but we aren’t into it yet, or am I wrong?

Continuing our tradition of difficult to pronounce Italian name, we’re happy to announce the Arduino Duemilanove (“2009″). This is the latest revision of the basic Arduino USB board, replacing the Diecimila. The Duemilanove automatically selects the appropriate power source (USB or external adaptor), eliminating the need for a power selection jumper. It also includes an easy to cut trace for disabling the board’s auto-reset (and a solder jumper for re-enabling it). It’s the easiest-to-use Arduino yet, even if the name is a mouthful (non-Italians should feel free to call it “2009″).

The release of the Arduino Duemilanove coincides with the launch of Massimo Banzi’s book, Getting Started with Arduino, from O’Reilly. We’re very happy that there’s now a printed introduction for people who are just starting out with Arduino. It’s a great complement to the more advanced Making Things Talk, by Tom Igoe (also from O’Reilly).

The Duemilanove will be replacing the Diecimila at our distributors over the coming weeks.

The other day we got this article recommended in the developers email list, it is about a way of making a minimal Arduino-based board using an oscillator in the shape of a traditional Japanese Sandal. I may be making up the story, but thegoogle translation of the article is not making things better.

picture (c) 2008 by the author

Just a quick post to announce that my book “Getting Started with Arduino” is available from O’Reilly.

You can find more details here http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596155513/

Massimo

Arduino.poet, the name he has chosen for our forum, posted some days ago a movie to his latest project. This Segway-like robot is able of standing up for some time running on a couple of Lego motors controlled by one Arduino board reading data from a Gyroscope.

video (c) 2008 by arduino.poet, also known as arduino2lego on sourceforge.net

The project has also a library of code attached to it. You can find it on Sourceforget as the arduino2lego project. It is generating a very interesting discussion in our foum, visit it if you want to be participate.

The project has been featured in Gizmodo and Hackaday among others. It has brought both the best and the worst out of commentators. From “it is not stable enough” to “at our school the students will be building this next year, with exactly the same parts”.

In my personal opion (and here I don’t represent the rest of the Arduino team) it is pretty amazing to come out with this project, share it with others, and wait to get critique. Those that just speak aloud praising the goods of all the other projects should try to make it themselves first. Arduino is about making it and helping others to make it. So from my side arduino.poet gets 10 points out of 10.

Alexander Olivares from the Cenditel Foundation in Venezuela sent us today an email about their latest development in Open Hardware; since their foundation is not supporting Java for different reasons, they have been putting some effort since our visit there and are quite happy to present their first version of theirplugin of Arduino for Editra.

picture (c) 2008 by Alexander Olivares at the Cenditel Foundation, Venezuela

The way it has been implemented is as a plugin for the open source editor/compiler Editra, the current version supports:

This of course presents lots of advantages for users running linux based operating systems with low processing power where Java is not really an option. From the Arduino Team we are happy to see this development and we would love to see it going further and eventually becoming a debian installation package what would make things even easier for many linux users out there.

The plugin has been made in Spanish, if there is anybody interested in contacting Alexander (aolivares AT SPAMFREE cenditel DOT gob.ve) and translating this into other languages, we will be more than happy to host the documentation on the Playground and the other wikis.

The guys from Buglabs posted an article where they explain how to connect their box to Arduino. On the picture you can see an Arduino Mini, a USB-Serial converter and one of the Buglab´s devices talking over a USB port.

picture (c) 2008 by Jan Rellermeyer at Bugblogger.com

It would be fun to try this out by ourselves … if you guys wanna send us out one of your machines, we can publish some nice articles about how to make those two kids talk to each other 

It is the time when universities re-open their September courses, just to be ready for that we decided to finally migrate the Arduino.cc server space to a different provider. It has taken us a long time to decide for one that could cover all our needs, but it has been definitely worth the effort.

Table showing how the bandwidth was distributed during September 15th in KB.

The stats thrown by the server in just its first 24 hours of existence show something we kind of knew: the first thing students do when going back to school is downloading the IDE, the second looking for some information in the forum. The total web traffic during the last 24 hours, since our DNSs updated the new server on the internet, is 35GB, a new record. Now that we have got the proper online services we can go back to the discussion of setting a better file distribution system (and here I have to thank Nick who kindly put a lot of effort in making a study of this before).

During the migration of the email lists, we discovered a very interesting fact … Arduino.cc has 147 registered developers on the developers[at]arduino.cc email list, among others people from other open source projects like Processing or Puredata, two projects we admire. It is really great to work with all of you guys, thanks for joining us!

The new server stats and protection systems show a whole lot of funny data, but that is obviously not the most relevant reason of why we migrated. Now we are ready to offer the services we couldn’t offer before. Next steps will be:

- password integration for registered users services: one password to control them all

- better user profiles: promote yourself and your work through the community

- language email lists: we will keep the old city-located email lists, but we are going to move towards language lists. Some cities have very active email lists, but some of the others are just a nest of spam. It is time to clean this up

- voting systems: promote your code and vote for the best solutions to the same problems

- translations: yeah, we talked about it before, now we can have locales for all possible languages!! From Russian to Japanese, we will be able of offering wikis in other languages, as long as we find translators –> interested? send an email to: translations[at]arduino.cc

…

These services and other surprises to happen soon. Now that we have creative freedom on our server, we are ready to get better in the way we use the web.