An Arduino for every project
Banzi co-developed Arduino while teaching at a design school in northwest Italy, simply because there weren't any good hardware options for his students. "We had to figure out something that would be simple, cheaper, USB plug and play, and you could program on Windows, Mac, and Linux," he said.
"Arduino allows you to move your code across platforms so you can always choose the platform that fits with your project."
Arduino was expected to be useful "in that particular tiny context," but it morphed into something much bigger. "It sort of escaped the lab—let's put it this way, you know like a virus—and started to touch all sorts of different other markets," Banzi said. "Now if you go to the Maker Faire, you see that 80 percent of the projects are running on Arduino in one way or another."
There are about a million official
Arduino boards "out in the wild" and perhaps several million more of the unofficial variety, he said. Arduino is trademarked—even though it's open hardware, makers of new products should "explicitly say that you're not connected to Arduino and your product is a derivative," the company says.
While some Arduino clones are made well and are compatible with Arduino software, there are many cheap knockoffs, Banzi said. "There is a problem that a number of people have started to use the '
Cheap Arduino Compatible' words too much," he said. "There's no guarantee it's going to be compatible or that you can use the official Arduino IDE [integrated development environment] to program it."
A company called
Seeed Studio has done a good job making products that are compatible and respectful of trademarks. But there are many bad apples, which Banzi has catalogued on his website.
Beyond that problem, pretty much everything is going great for Arduino. The new Intel- and ARM-based Arduinos take their place alongside existing boards like the
Arduino Uno, based on the ATmega328 8-bit microcontroller and
Microcontroller Kit.
"Arduino allows you to move your code across platforms so you can always choose the platform that fits with your project."
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Raspberry Pi,
3D printers
