Today we open Arduino Labs, a new website we have been working on for a few weeks that will allow us to post documentation about projects we are working on that are not ready to be “official” yet.

We want to have a more open development process within the Arduino project and this is one of the many steps that are getting us there.

Another function of Labs is to bring closer to Arduino a number of projects made by members of the community that we want to make more official and easier to find.

There are a lot of libraries, for example, developed by great people that sometimes are hard to find or the original maintainer stops working on them at some point. With Labs we’ll be able to create a permanent home for those libraries and give space on our gihub for that code.

This is just the beginning but we already have a couple of great projects for you:

Android/Arduino ADK tool for Processing

a set of tools that let you develop Android accessories with Arduino using only the Processing language without having to learn how to program the Android API in Eclipse. We believe this will make it much simpler for people to make use of the power of the Arduino ADK board

Arduino GSM Shield

In the last few months we have been working with the great people at Telefonica I+D in Spain on the design of a GPRS shield for Arduino. We made a few prototypes that have been used in a Hackaton we ran with Telefonica in Spain on the 17 of july. The pages on Labs provide the initial documentation for the prototypes and open the door to more work to be done to make the product ready for everybody.

We hope you appreciate this new tool and please send us feedback or propose projects at labs@arduino.cc