He also needed something that could run on Macintosh computers, which were ubiquitous among the IDII designers. But the BASIC Stamp had two problems, Banzi discovered: It didn't have enough computing power for some of the projects his students had in mind, and it was also a bit too expensive-a board plus basic parts could cost about US $100. Coded with the BASIC programming language, the Stamp was like a tidy little circuit board, packing the essentials of a power supply, a microcontroller, memory, and input/output ports for attaching hardware. Like many of his colleagues, Banzi relied on theīASIC Stamp, a microcontroller created by California company Parallax that engineers had been using for about a decade. But with a shrinking budget and limited class time, his options for tools were few. It was 2002, and Banzi, a bearded and avuncular software architect, had been brought on by IDII as an associate professor to promote new ways of doing interactive design-a nascent field sometimes known as physical computing. “We need to make the next jump," Banzi tells me, “and become an established company."Īrduino rose out of another formidable challenge: how to teach students to create electronics, fast. It's also a start-up company run by Banzi and a group of friends, and it's facing a challenge that even their magic board can't solve: how to survive success and grow. As Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher of Make magazine, the bible of DIY builders, puts it, Arduino has become “the brains of maker projects."īut Arduino isn't just an open-source project that aims to make technology more accessible. Google has recently released an Arduino-based development kit for its Android smartphone. There are Arduino parties and Arduino clubs. Breathalyzers, LED cubes, home-automation systems, Twitter displays, and even DNA analysis kits.
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