Arduino | 2005

Arduino

 Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community from Italy, designing and manufacturing single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for creating digital devices. Arduino hardware products are licensed under the CC BY-SA license, while the software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL), allowing anyone to manufacture and distribute Arduino boards and software. Arduino boards are commercially available through the official website or authorized distributors.

The Arduino board design uses various microprocessors and controllers and includes digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins for interfacing with various expansion boards (called "shields"), breadboards (for prototyping), and other circuits. Some models include serial communication interfaces, such as USB, which are also used to load programs. Microcontrollers can be programmed in C and C++ (embedded C), using the standard API known as the Arduino programming language. This language is inspired by the Processing language and is used with a modified Processing IDE. In addition to traditional compiler toolchains, the Arduino project offers a command-line tool and an integrated development environment (IDE) developed in Go language.

The Arduino project started in 2005 at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) as a tool for students, aiming to provide an affordable way to create devices that interact with the environment. Common examples include simple hobbyist projects like robots, thermostats, and motion detectors.

The name "Arduino" comes from a cafe in Ivrea, Italy, where several of the project's founders frequently met. The cafe's name is derived from Arduin, the margrave of Ivrea who ruled from 1002 to 1014.

The Arduino project began at IDII, where students were using a $50 BASIC Stamp microcontroller. In 2004, Hernando Barragán created the Wiring development platform as part of his master's thesis project, supervised by Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas. Reas, along with Ben Fry, co-founded the Processing development platform. The aim of the project was to create simple, affordable tools for non-experts to make digital projects. The Wiring platform consisted of a printed circuit board (PCB) with an ATmega128 microcontroller and an IDE based on Processing, with library functions to make programming easy. In 2005, Massimo Banzi, along with other IDII students, extended Wiring to support the cheaper ATmega8 microcontroller, leading to the creation of the Arduino project.

The early core team of Arduino consisted of Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis.

After the platform was completed, lighter and cheaper versions were distributed to the open-source community, and by mid-2011, more than 300,000 official Arduino boards were commercially produced. By 2013, it was estimated that over 700,000 official boards had reached users.

In early 2008, the founders of the Arduino project formed Arduino LLC to hold the Arduino brand trademark. Manufacturing and sales were handled by third-party companies, with Arduino LLC receiving royalties from them. However, by the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino's company, Smart Projects, had registered the Arduino trademark in Italy, keeping this fact secret from the other co-founders for about two years. When the Arduino company attempted to register the trademark in other regions, the issue was revealed, and attempts to bring the trademark under Arduino LLC's control failed. In 2014, Smart Projects began refusing royalty payments, and the company, led by new CEO Federico Musto, changed its name to Arduino SRL and created a website at arduino.org, which copied the layout and graphics of the original arduino.cc site, leading to a split within the Arduino development team.

In January 2015, Arduino LLC filed a lawsuit against Arduino SRL.

In May 2015, Arduino LLC created a new trademark, Genuino, which was used outside of the United States.

On October 1, 2016, at the New York World Maker Faire, Massimo Banzi, CEO of Arduino LLC, and Federico Musto, CEO of Arduino SRL, announced the merger of the two companies to form Arduino AG. Banzi also announced plans to launch a new Arduino Foundation, but later withdrew the decision.

In April 2017, Wired reported that Musto had falsified his academic record. Musto had claimed to have an MIT Ph.D. on his website, LinkedIn profile, and business documents, but no record of his attendance at the university could be found. Musto later admitted in an interview that he had never obtained such a degree. In July 2017, Musto removed several open-source licenses, schematics, and code from the Arduino website, leading to criticism and protests.

In July 2017, BCMI was established by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, and Tom Igoe to acquire Arduino AG and all Arduino trademarks. Fabio Violante replaced Federico Musto as CEO.

In October 2017, Arduino announced a partnership with ARM Holdings, stating that Arduino would continue to collaborate with all technology suppliers and architectures while maintaining its independence as a core value. Under Violante's leadership, the company began to grow again, releasing new designs. The Genuino trademark was discontinued, and all products reverted to the Arduino name.

In August 2018, Arduino released a new open-source command-line tool, arduino-cli, which allows users to program boards from the shell, replacing the IDE.

In February 2019, Arduino expanded the Create online environment with the launch of the IoT Cloud service.

As of February 2020, the Arduino community has approximately 30 million active users, based on IDE downloads.

Arduino is open-source hardware, with reference designs distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license, available on the Arduino website. Layouts and production files are also provided for some hardware versions.

Hardware and software designs are freely available, but developers are asked to use the Arduino name only for official products. Derivative works that use the Arduino name without permission cannot use the name. Official policy documents emphasize requirements for the use of the Arduino name, and the Arduino project remains open to integrating other people's work into official products. Various commercial products compatible with Arduino have been released, some functionally identical and interchangeable with Arduino, while others enhance basic Arduino features or alter the form factor for different uses.