It’s been a month -almost- since I was posting anything to the blog. It has been a busy time looking through things in the server. The team is working hard preparing the NYU March meeting, as Massimo mentioned on the Uno Punto Zero post:

In march, during the NYU spring break, we’ll meet up at ITP in New York to exchange notes and test our assumptions followed by a social event somewhere in town (we’ll have more details about this as we are organising it right now)

Massimo coordinates the action, making sure the event will run smoothly, ITP -the school Tom teaches at- has approved the use of their facilities for the meeting, and we are now working with the specifics of who does what. There are at least two independent teams (one Italian and one Spanish) making video documentaries about Arduino and we hope they will make it to NY to interview both the team and the event participants. Massimo is also coordinating the press for the event, just drop us a line if you work for any kind of media and are interested in documenting the event. We will try to schedule you in somehow.

There has been a lot going on during the silent month. I think it is worth letting people know about it.

Arduino 0018

Dave released Arduino 0018 after a month-long testing process. This latest revision of the software is not just a bug-fix from 0017, but includes a lot of feedback from the developer’s list, as well as from the teacher’s one. Go here to download the latest IDE’s version.

I you want to influence Arduino’s IDE development, you should subscribe to one of those two (or both) discussion lists. There is really a lot of people participating of the creation of the next Arduino, but your opinions are for sure good for us to improve our software, hardware, and documentation materials.

Server operation

The Arduino server reached record levels in performance. We registered almost 14.000.000 hits (344.932 unique visitors) just by moving the downloads from our webserver to a second server. We upgraded to a new version of the OS and will upgrade the forum software. The forum searches are now operated by Google (who already had indexed everything) and the blog is always updated to the latest version.

There is still a list of things to be done, but with the server at its full power, things are much easier. Now we can concentrate in improving the wiki with some requests to make easier the making of new pages, create translations and so on. Give us your opinion of what should be made first on the forum.

Contests

Like every other month, one of our distributors comes out with a new contest to invite you guys to share your creations with others while getting a chance to get some free gear. This time, Libelium, one of Arduino’s distributors in Spain, is launching their 3rd Arduino contest. Last year the level went pretty high, I am looking forward to see this year’s outcome to this contest.

Events

One of the reasons I had no time to post on the blog during the last weeks is that I was teaching at Valencia’s Polytechnical University – Arts and Technology Master course (Spanish only). Valencia is one of those places known for being really touristic.

However, there is much more than sandals and sun-glasses in the city. I found out there is a collective dedicated to promote open culture that runs the Generatech events’ series. If you are interested in gender and technology, this is your place. You should take a look at their promotion video, but also these posters #1 y #2 (I am not posting them here because of their explicit content).

Press

The Swedish specialized press has finally discovered us. December’s edition of the magazine “Elektronik” , that is delivered free of charge to anyone that requests it inside Sweden, published a small note about Arduino and last week came out with an interview. Unfortunately it’s just in Swedish, but I think Google translate makes a nice job if you want to see what it says.