Massimo Banzi announced it some minutes ago during his annual “The state of Arduino” presentation at Maker Faire Bay Area:  Arduino Yún  is the first of a revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux.

Yún means “cloud” in chinese language,  as the purpose of this board to make it simple to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.

Designed in collaboration with Dog Hunter, a company with extensive experience with Linux, the board adopts the Linino distribution which provides signed packages to ensure the authenticity of the software installed on the device.

Historically, interfacing Arduino with complex web services has been quite a challenge due to the limited memory available and they tend to use verbose text based formats like XML that require quite a lot or ram to parse. On the Arduino Yún we have created the Bridge library which delegates all network connections and processing of HTTP transactions to the Linux machine.

Arduino Yún is the combination of a classic Arduino Leonardo (based on the Atmega32U4 processor) with a Wifi system-on-a-chip running Linino (a MIPS GNU/Linux based on OpenWRT). It’s based on the ATMega32u4 microcontroller and on the Atheros AR9331, a system on a chip running Linino, a customized version of OpenWRT, the most used Linux distribution for embedded devices.

Like a Leonardo, it has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connector.

Like any modern computer, it’s Wi-Fi enabled, it has a Standard-A type USB connector to which you can connect your USB devices and it has a micro-SD card plug, for additional storage.

The Yún ATMega32u4 can be programmed as a standard Arduino board by plugging it to your computer with the micro USB connector. And you can also program it via Wi-Fi.

When the Yún is turned on for the first time, it becomes an Access Point, creating a Wi-Fi network named “Arduino”. Open your browser and go to the webpanel: configure the board by entering your Wi-Fi network name, type and password. Click the “Configure” button to restart the board and have it join your home network. Opening the IDE, you’ll see it listed in the “Port” sub menu with its IP address instead of the serial port name.

Using the Bridge library in your sketches, you can link the 32u4 to Linux, launching programs and scripts, passing them parameters (sensor readings for example) and reading their output, thus creating a strong integration between the creativity of your sketch and the power of Linux. The Yún supports Shell and Python scripts out-of-the-box but you can install a wide range of open source software and tools.

For the Linux geek in you, Yún can be reached with SSH:  that means you’ll be able to customize it in whatever way. And you’ll always be able to reset it to its factory settings.

On top of that to make it even simpler to create complex applications we’ve partnered with the innovative startup Temboo which provides normalized access to 100+ APIs from a single point of contact allowing developers to mix and match data coming from multiple platforms (for example Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare but even FedEx or PayPal).

Arduino Yún will be available at the end of June at the price of 69$ + taxes.

The world’s most diverse showcase of creativity and innovation in technology, craft and science is starting tomorrow in San Mateo, California and the Arduino team will be there with more than a couple of new things to present.

First of all, finally and officially the Arduino Robot will be alive and running around the Arduino tent to bring you into the world of robotics. Designed with Complubot, the 4-time world champions in Robocup Junior robotics soccer, the robot allows for endless hours of experimentation and play. It is a self-contained platform allowing you to build interactive machines to explore the world. As all the other Arduino products you can use it as it is, modify its software and even add your own hardware on top of it: it is perfect for the novice but also for those looking for their next challenge.

As you may have read in the article published on MAKE some days ago, The Arduino Robot is the result of the collective effort from an international team looking at how science can be made fun to learn and we loved to share its story. Connected with this aim, David Cuartellies – head of Arduino Verkstad, the Arduino office in Malmö (Sweden) – during Maker Faire Bay Area will present the Castilla Education Project  aiming at evaluating the use of Arduino and other open source tools in the schools of Spain. He’ll especially focus on the way content was created and validated in an experiment involving 24 schools, 30 teachers, over 500 kids, and a 6-members design team.

On the topic of education also Michael Shiloh — Coordinator of Education materials for Arduino, will be on the Education stage on Sunday  at 4.30pm for a Q&A on how to use Arduino boards and how to prepare material for teaching.

Then we’re happy to announce that Arduino is releasing the new version of the Arduino IDE and the new TFT screen. TCT LCD library relies on the Adafruit GFX and ST7735 libraries.   The Arduino specific library, named TFT, extends the Adafruit libraries to support more Processing-like methods. You can write text, draw shapes, and show bitmap images on the screen in a way that should be familiar to users of Processing.

If you want to hear all these news from the voice of Massimo Banzi, don’t miss the center stage of Maker Faire Bay Area, saturday 18th of May from 1.30 and come to visit us at the Arduino tent (see map below for directions).

As Ken Denmead, MAKE Editorial Director, announced some hours ago we are also thrilled for the monthly column Massimo’s is going to write for MAKE blog. We’ve been brainstorming on the title and the final choice is “MAKE the Future with Arduino” :

Massimo will share his unique perspective on the Arduino platform, including insight on the development of the boards, new products, and exciting projects for Arduino fans to share and adapt. Indeed, today’s first column is a preview of an exciting new Arduino product that will be unveiled to the world at Maker Faire Bay Area this week—the Arduino Robot.

Enjoy the article  and stay tuned for more news!

MakerFaire Rome, for the first time gathering makers from all over Europe, is coming up and the clock is ticking while the Call for Makers closes next 2nd of June.
That’s why we thought to launch a call for collaboration to local hubs, makerspaces and fablab into helping us spreading the word.

If you are one of them and you think that makers from your city in Europe would be interested in  joining the event and submitting a project to the call, we can send you a package full of flyers, postcards, stickers and support you into organizing a local event about it.

To join the team of Proxies fill THIS short form with your name, city, country, name of your local hub and address and we’ll get back to you.

The form we’ll be open until monday 14th of May and then we’ll announce the list of those receiving the kit. We have only 50 kits available so be quick to feedback us

The MakerFaire Rome Ambassador Kit includes:
Posters
Flyers
Pins
Stickers
Tape
Postit
Small stickers

+ an exclusive limited edition Arduino Uno board

Thanks in advance for your help and support, and see you at Maker Faire Rome!

For any question join us in the forum.
hashtag: #c4mrome

Here’s a couple of videos from the Tour! Follow the camper on Twitter with the hashtag #makertour:

Al periodico appuntamento con l’elettronica amatoriale presso Modena Fiere, che oggi e domani (19-20 Gennaio) ospita Expo Elettronica, i makers e gli hobbysti emiliano-romagnoli non possono rimanere delusi per il calibro degli ospiti in programma. Officine Arduino, assieme ai ragazzi del FabLab di Reggio Emilia, offrono un’occasione unica per confrontarsi con il mondo dei makers e con la prototipazione DIY, grazie a numerose varianti di stampanti 3D esposte e funzionanti, assieme alla possibilità di provare e “toccare con mano” alcune delle novità più interessanti del mondo Arduino, come l’Arduino DUE.

Lo stand del FabLab di Reggio Emilia.

Alcune delle novità più interessanti riguardano i prossimi eventi in programma, fra cui troviamo l’importante “Makre Faire – The European Edition”, che verrà ospitata per la prima volta in Italia nei giorni 3-6 Ottobre 2013 a Roma e che vedrà coinvolta l’intera comunità di makers provenienti da tutta Europa. Fra gli eventi in programma vi saranno conferenze, workshop hands-on e numerosi speech, in aggiunta alla fiera “vera e propria” che si terrà nel week-end.

Per partecipare come espositori, a partire dal 18 Febbraio si aprirà una “Call for makers” alla quale chiunque sia interessato potrà inviare la propria candidatura e i propri progetti, che verranno accuratamente selezionati per costituire il programma delle numerose esposizioni previste. Stay tuned sull’home page della fiera per i prossimi aggiornamenti!

Costantino e Davide presentano la Maker Faire di Roma.

Fra gli imminenti eventi in calendario elenchiamo il prossimo Workshop Base di Arduino che si terrà i giorni 26-27 Gennaio a Reggio Emilia, presso il FabLab “Spazio Gerra”. Le iscrizioni sono ancora aperte, ma i posti ancora disponibili sono limitati! Accorrete numerosi!

Hamburg Maker Meeting 2012, which took place last week and involved about 200 visitors and more than 20 exhibitors, has been a fantastic opportunity to meet and share experience regarding several topics, such as 3D printing, hacking, retro gaming and so on. At the Attraktor Makerspace, several projects have been presented and demonstrated by their inventors, among which we highlight a very nice Arduino-based floppy drive organ that has been employed to play the Tetris game theme.

Moreover, among the others events planned for the meeting, a special sneak-preview session allowed all the interested people to get some insights on the new Arduino Due board, released a couple of days ago.

A video of the event can be found here, while here you may find more pictures.

More information can be found on the homepage of the meeting.

[Via: Hamburg Maker Meeting website]

On his blog, Stephen Wolfram, worldwide known as the creator of Mathematica (a widespread computational software) and Wolfram Alpha (a knowledge engine), describes his experience at last NY Maker Faire, where he was supposed to give a public talk.

One of his sons, Christopher (13 years old) suggested him a very cool way to improve his talk, by making it much more dynamic with some practical demos. Indeed, after his father’s talk, he reached the stage and started his personal presentation, which involved the use of both Mathematica and Arduino.

After showing how to graphically and interactively present analog readings from an Arduino board, he moved on to show how to control a quadricopter drone just by indicating the path to follow directly from Mathematica. As if it wasn’t enough for a 13-years old boy, several questions arose from the audience, which allowed him to show also how to directly process real-time video coming from the quadricopter with the computational software.

More information can be found here.

As a final remark, it’s always very nice to see what very young boys can do with the availability of right tools that can help their creativity and their imagination.

[Via: Stephen Wolfram's blog]

In this video Massimo explains the Arduino Leonardo, talking about its differences with Arduino UNO and playing around with its mouse & keyboard features.

If you want to have a closer look to the latest arrival in the Arduino Family click here, if you want to follow Massimo’s project click here. Arduino Leonardo comes in two different flavours: with headers and without headers.

Missed the maker-faire? No worries! Catch awesome pictures and works of Arduino, Ana Araujo, Ella Smith, Greg Klein, William Martin and likes right here.

What interested you the most? Do write to us, we would love to hear!

Via:[patch.com]