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The future of Arduino

Davide GombaJuly 21st, 2010

Chris Anderson met Gianluca and Massimo last week. He wrote a wonderful post full of pictures about the future of Arduino (see alco Arduino Blog) and the arduino PCB production.

A week ago I spent a day with the Arduino team in and around Milan (production lead Gianluca Martino at left above, with raw Arduino PCBs coming off the fab). Here’s a quick report.

First, we talked a lot about the Punto Uno (“Version 1.0”) release. It’s kinda incredible that Arduino is still described as Alpha software and stuck in decimal versions after all these years. Well, no more. In September, it will finally be released in a 1.0 version.

In italian, Punto and Uno is two name of different FIAT cars ;). He obviously means Uno Punto Zero, which is 1.0.

read more

from [Arduino Blog]

There’s a detailed list of the changes planned or considered for Arduino 1.0 on our development site (hosted by Google Code). The main items include:

Environment:

  • New file extension to replace the .pde borrowed from Processing (issue #13).
  • Redesigned toolbar icons (issue #291).
  • Ability to upload sketches using an in-system programmer (ISP) from the IDE (issue #260).
  • Simplifying the process of selecting your board and serial port (issues #223 and #257).
  • Command-line compilation and uploading of sketches (issue #124).

Language (most of these are possibilities and still open for discussion):

  • Creating events that can be called automatically, e.g. the serialEvent() as in Processing (issue #263).
  • Adding specific functions for enabling / disabling the internal pullup resistors (issue #246).
  • Modifying the behavior of print() on bytes (issue #284).
  • Functions for accessing more of the low-level functionality of the hardware timers and other peripherals (issues #169 and #248).
  • Optimizing the digitalWrite() function (issue #140).

Chris took a lot of pictures of the variuos steps of the Arduino production:

and assembly

read the full story (and more pics) on [DIYDrones] and the [Arduino Blog Post] about version 1.0