Since we started the Southern Scandinavia Arduino meetings last year, Mikael would pop up to show his latest music instrument, discuss about some funky projects or just drink a cup of coffee. During our last meeting in Malmo, he came out with his best kept secret: Gobetwino, a Windows program that can link Arduino boards with anything software. There are many approaches to connect Arduino with software packages, but he takes the one of hacking one of the most useful MS Windows features: it is possible to call any programs by means of keystrokes, and it is possible to generate keystroke-like events via software.

Gobetwino by M. Morup, picture by D. Sjunnesson

Gobetwino will log data into a file, send you an email, type into a word document or an excel sheet, send a command to Arduino on email arrival… The only backdrop of this amazing piece of code is that it won’t run in my Ubuntu-powered laptop! The software is currently freeware in its revision 0.5 and Mikael promises in his website he will open source it in the future, once the code has been cleaned up and the Danish comments have been translated (believe me, you don’t want Danish-commented source… or maybe you do) . It comes with a 35 pages manual that will guide you through the configurations needed to make Gobetwino open files, send emails, and report to Arduino. If you want to help Mikael with further developing Gobetwino, go ahead, stress-test it in your computer and report the bugs to him.

Mikael Moerup is an artist and designer living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was part of The Lab, a defunct media space in the center of the Danish capital, builds crazy music instruments, likes chocolate, and has the ability of finding cheap-but-cool LCDs with red backlight!

Here we go! Download Gobetwino directly here!