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Arduino Summit

dcuartiellesMarch 26th, 2008

Arduino Team at K3

(back) Dave Mellis, Tom Igoe; (front) Gianluca Martino, David Cuartielles, Massimo Banzi

Arduino’s team met during the Easter weekend 2008 for the first time since 2005 when the five member were seen together at a small restaurant in Ivrea, Italy. The group spent three days speaking about the future of prototyping technologies, trying out better ways how to structure the Arduino web-services, testing the forthcoming v0011 (thanks to everybody involved in the discussion process), and analyzing the best ways to improve user experience both on the hardware and software sides.

K3, the School of Arts and Communication at Malmo University, Sweden, kindly sponsored this three days gathering. The snow outdoors wouldn’t allow sightseeing, what helped to work through a much longer agenda than planned.

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4 Responses to “Arduino Summit”

  1. Stefan (Stefans Blog) Says:

    What are the results? What is the future of prototyping? Would be very interesting for me 🙂

  2. Zach Smith Says:

    Awesome! Any word on what you guys came up with?

  3. dcuartielles Says:

    Well, we are still organizing our notes, we had three wild brainstorming days. I can anticipate that there is going to be a new way of arranging the website, we are going to revamp the Spanish site, open the Korean one, and make a new menu system.

    There are new boards and new shields coming pretty soon. There are new distributors and new manufacturers. Therefore we are going to arrange the information trying to make it as easy as possible for newbies to look for their closest dealer.

    There is also a thought on grouping the email lists by language instead of by city. There is an endless amount of spam we have to filter every day and they happen to be of very little use. We will have a general newsletter a-la-Processing style. We love the idea of sending a message to everybody once in a while (the Processing guys send about one email every 1,5 years).

    The forum, on the other hand, seems to work pretty well. The amount of moderation we face is big but not huge. There are a lot of people helping others, announcements for new designs, etc. We seem to be close to a solution to the spam … however we are planning to unify the looks a little bit with the general website, as well as linking the user database for the forum and the playground. This is a nasty hack and we may face some technical issues, but it will for sure benefit everybody.

    Talking about the playground, we consider to have profile pages. There are a lot of contributors and they deserve to have the best publicity ever -if they feel like. Therefore we think that adding the profiles will allow contributors to link their personal projects to ours.

    The examples require a revision. Until Arduino 0007 we had a whole bunch of examples for specific sensors. We consider them too specific and removed them for later versions. However it has proven neccessary to put many of those back in the IDE for educational purposes. We will then have two different levels of examples: the ones that are meant to explain the basic functions in the reference, and the ones running sensors like accelerometers, ultrasound, etc. This new examples folder will eventually be called “cookbook” and will be open for all of you making new devices accessible to others.

    On the C front of things, we are reaching a library structure that seems to be stable enough. There are going to be improvements in e.g. the LCD library and some others that have been submitted as candidates to be included in the IDE.

    Going back to the translations, there are some materials produced in Spanish that could be translated back to English. We will have to look for a meaningful method to arrange the work so that all that manifested interest in contributing can do it in an easy way.

    Regarding the endless question of “the future of prototyping”, we understand that there is no clear answer to it. We are part of a community of practicioners, people that do things many times just for the pleasure of seeing them happen…

    … but that is a different story, isn’t it?

  4. kevin Says:

    I have been looking on Wikipedia and the like trying to find information on the history of the Arduino. How and when did the project start? When was the first board released?

    Thanks!
    -Kevin

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