Microsoft and Arduino: new partnership announced today

It’s a special day for the Makers’ community. Massimo Banzi is in San Francisco attending Build Conference, the biggest developer event of the calendar year for Microsoft and today Microsoft is announcing a strong partnership with Arduino: Windows 10 is in fact the world’s first Arduino certified operating system!
‘Arduino Certified’ Windows 10 enables makers to easily create smart objects combining hardware-driving capability of Arduino with the software capabilities of Windows.
For example, a security camera can be built by using Arduino to power the motors controls to tilt/turn the camera and using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to create great UI, to connect the camera to the cloud, to process the image for motion detection and for adding facial/voice recognition.
The makers’ community can now also enjoy Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino technologies – both released as open source libraries.

With Windows Remote Arduino developers can (wirelessly) access the capabilities of Windows 10 devices as if they were physically attached to an Arduino Shield and leveraging Arduino functions directly from Universal Windows Application.
In this way Microsoft is enabling developers to extend their Universal Windows Platform Application with Arduino commands (that execute on a wirelessly connected Arduino device). Combining the power of Windows 10 devices including features such as Image processing, Speech recognition, Website parsing, Cameras and Advanced Audio pipelines with the power of physical world interactivity through Arduino enables incredible new scenarios to be created. Take a look at this Basic Windows Remote Arduino project to learn how to leverage this technology in any interactive project.
With Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino, users can tap into the incredible power of their Windows 10 devices through wireless protocols. For example Lumia 530 contains a lot of Arduino Shield capabilities and allows designers/makers to connect all those components seamlessly. Imagine being able to create an Arduino project that includes GPS, Web connectivity/parsing, touch display, speech technologies and more! Take a look at this Picture the Weather project created to bring children’s drawings to life!
Arduino is really happy that Microsoft got inspired by the enthusiasm and passion for technology represented by the Maker community and we look forward to see the amazing projects opening up from this unique offering.

May 6th, 2015 at 14:01:57
the only thing MS has ever followed through with is their OS. it is the only thing that is important to them. I have many “FAILED” microsoft products including routers, joysticks, HD DVD Player for XBOX, PocketPC and more. i fu@%$#& hate microsoft. maybe it is time to look at another real open source product. Arduino I thought you were smarter than this but i guess i was wrong. Just like IBM you will be assimilated.
May 6th, 2015 at 14:29:47
arduino boards will be for sale on ebay today!!!! Cheap.
May 6th, 2015 at 21:13:03
What does it take to be an Arduino certified OS?
May 8th, 2015 at 04:33:53
Really really sad and worryng news . In any case MacOs is more stable and steady.
May 9th, 2015 at 00:29:09
What’s so bad about Microsoft?
I run W7 Ultimate.
The only problem is that IE is terrible. So I’m writing this from Chrome, which took 30 seconds to install
May 9th, 2015 at 03:37:19
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO… =(
SAD… SAD…. =(
May 11th, 2015 at 20:57:25
i alsow agree with GeekRedux which postet the first comment. MS and Arduino?, well thats a bad idea.
May 14th, 2015 at 18:05:55
This is the saddest news … Realy windows ?
May 17th, 2015 at 19:38:38
Kind of makes you wonder what Arduino got from MS to pull this one. Between this and Raspberry Pi MS is buying up open source all over the place. And before anyone accuses me of being ‘closed minded’ let MS put its money where its mouth is and open Wndows first. Then I might believe that MS has ‘seen the light’. Anything less and they are only wanting to play the open source community, IMHO.
May 21st, 2015 at 15:50:54
Hey- You can get Windows for Raspberry Pi! 🙂
May 22nd, 2015 at 02:59:36
@syntaxerror: that was the first thing that went through my mind also.. Microsoft is trying to spread its influence where it doesn’t belong. I think at the end of the day this is part of their grand scheme to be on a billion devices by 2017. Still sad news though..
June 12th, 2015 at 05:35:46
🙂 othinking some $$$ for next project 🙁
July 29th, 2015 at 17:00:33
c’mon guys, whats so bad/sad about microsoft? Partnership with microsoft is no “ridiculous”. what “ridiculous” is being a fanboy of anything. i agree whit that opinion says, if i can do more with arduino than it’s better, if you want open source at all like virtual shields go program yourself in ubuntu
July 31st, 2015 at 22:13:24
Code bender is a browser on Google and Firefox for programming your arduino but never allowed on IE so kiss off windows 10 with Edge when Firefox and codebenders does fgor me.
August 19th, 2015 at 07:07:40
i think it’s a good news. widening the scope for the developers.
MS is not that badd…!!!
lets not make the prediction at so early… we will wait n watch.At the end if it comes up with something productive …..it will be better.
August 28th, 2015 at 14:26:06
So Microsoft finally included FTDI driver in their OS?
That’s good news indeed, like, woohoo!
But bad news is, whoever makes strategic partners with Microsoft
and makes big deal of it, ends up dead.
Reality check:
DEC? Dead.
SGI? Dead.
And so on; you know they say – leave all hope you who enter here.
Err, but was it Arduino LLC or SRL?
I mean, the other one maybe survives longer.
Oh, will new windows automatically recognize both SRL and LLC cards?
Or we’ll get ‘unidentified board, go buy from us’ popup in IDE?
But who cares after all. There’s so many derivatives and manufacturers already, we don’t really need either Arduino anymore.
November 5th, 2015 at 18:22:39
How come the arduino, perhaps the embodiment of open source and making, is partnered with microsoft, the absolute kings of proprietary? as for “Windows 10 is in fact the world’s first Arduino certified operating system!” iI remember that windows users used to install mingw in order to use arduino!
what next? arduino IDE in C# and overexpensive?
November 5th, 2015 at 18:23:31
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
December 16th, 2015 at 19:46:33
Just not excited to make Ardunio work easily with the very low number of windows phones in existence (sales figures going down not up as % market share). Uploading data to a cloud server, so last year, and great if you want the NSA and the Chinese to have access to it. The new thing is small servers that can exchange data directly and will continue to work without an active Internet connection. Just another case of Microsoft being behind the times and using its big check book to play catch up.
February 22nd, 2016 at 06:21:06
Let’s face it. Only reason MS want to jump on the bandwagon is because of $$$. If they can’t produce decent operating systems after so many years, I doubt they will bring anything new to Arduino. If they can make Arduino even cheaper and better and keep it open source it will amaze me. Let’s hope
May 12th, 2016 at 20:55:50
PLEASE say it ain’t so!
MICRO$OFT = “EVIL”
DEAL WITH IT AND TELL ME THIS IS AN APRIL FOOLS PRANK THAT’S JUST A LITTLE LATE……
July 2nd, 2016 at 11:11:03
Time to move another free island until they find us again! $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
July 29th, 2016 at 16:39:54
I agree with GeekRedux too. Does this means having the skype over linux story again? All cool development goes to specific platforms…. ? I hope not.
September 28th, 2016 at 12:34:13
[…] year, Arduino and Microsoft announced a strong partnership and Windows 10 became the world’s first Arduino certified operating system. This partnership made […]
November 22nd, 2016 at 11:51:52
Great news.
December 14th, 2016 at 16:31:30
I don’t want to see any great developments for Arduino not be open source just because Microsoft was part of the development.
Will the agreements made between Arduino and Microsoft be “open-source” for everyone to look at? Is this agreement tech only, or financial?
It’s not too late to return some of Arduino’s virtue. If not, it looks like I will be finding another platform.
March 18th, 2017 at 09:03:21
[…] Microsoft and Arduino Partnership Announced […]
June 7th, 2017 at 06:28:38
Wow… the Arduino blog community is quite upset. I don’t see the big deal here, certainly not worth a mob-style response. Obviously, Microsoft has changed over the last five years, and is moving away from their “SkyNet” approach of the mid-80’s/90’s/2000’s decades. Yes, a lot more work is ahead for them, but I for one do like where the new CEO is taking them. They are a profit generating business, born in a capitalist society, and if you think about it, their existence also supports millions of “non-Microsoft” workers and industries.
To be honest, I have benefited greatly from Microsoft’s existence, like many others in the IT field, I’ve enjoyed a 25+ year career (Systems Admin) that involves implementation and support of many of Microsoft’s desktop/server OS’s, their productivity software, it’s infrastructure, and their exploding cloud services, like Azure and Office 365 Enterprise.
I don’t think this is going to turn out as the panic and vitriol suggest. We will see…. But Microsoft has also (in-directly) kept a lot of non-Microsoft employees employed on this planet, and during some disastrous times (2001, 2008).
Hate is just wasted energy anyway.
May 12th, 2018 at 10:39:51
Winduino hahahah