Happy tenth birthday Arduino
Today is Arduino Day and is the tenth anniversary of the release of the original Arduino specifications. Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I did a couple of projects designing and programming embedded systems (primarily the
Intel 8051 and I got my start on the
MOS 6502 with the
KIM-1). The Arduino brings this up to date.
This article at IEEE Spectrum gives a
little bit of the history:
The Making of Arduino
The picturesque town of Ivrea, which straddles the blue-green Dora Baltea River in northern Italy, is famous for its underdog kings. In 1002, King Arduin became the ruler of the country, only to be dethroned by King Henry II, of Germany, two years later. Today, the Bar di Re Arduino, a pub on a cobblestoned street in town, honors his memory, and that�s where an unlikely new king was born.
The bar is the watering hole of Massimo Banzi, the Italian cofounder of the electronics project that he named Arduino in honor of the place. Arduino is a low-cost microcontroller board that lets even a novice do really amazing things. You can connect an Arduino to all kinds of sensors, lights, motors, and other devices and use easy-to-learn software to program how your creation will behave. You can build an interactive display or a mobile robot and then share your design with the world by posting it on the Net.
The beauty is that it was designed to be very expandable. The circuit board is a specific size with two rows of sockets on each side. You can build or buy add-on boards (called Shields) that extend the functionality of the Arduino. Because these are open source and so prevalent, the bar to entry is dirt cheap and a lot of fun. Even Radio Shack sells them.
A bit more from the
Arduino website:
What is Arduino?
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.
Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.
The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment.
The Arduino is not a stand-alone computer as we know it -- it is an embedded system designed to do a few tasks. There are similar systems out there that run Linux and are more suited to general-purpose computing (
Raspberry-Pi /
Beaglebone) but those are different stories entirely.
Very cool stuff!!!
Posted by DaveH at March 29, 2014 10:23 PM