Uno Punto Zero
Dear Friends of Arduino
On the first day of 2010 we look back at five amazing years where Arduino has gone from being an idea into our heads to become a widely used platform for hardware learning and experimentation.
We set out to build a platform that helps people get stuff done without having too much focus on the technology used to get it done. We’re pleased to see many people have managed to do just that.
We have faced a happy challenge as the platform has seen more widespread use. We get more and more very qualified contributions and valuable suggestions from a many different sources. It is difficult to satisfy everyone while avoiding the platform bloat that we sought to avoid in our original goals. We believe we have been quite successful at keeping Arduino true to its roots, incorporating suggestions and contributions but still keeping it simple. Arduino has reached a reasonable level of stability and reliability, and it’s time to crystalise the work done so far and to graduate, as the title in Italian says, to 1.0
What does this mean for Arduino?
We plan to stabilise the API and the current IDE so that for the foreseeable future the reference, the examples, the tutorials and the books you buy should stay consistent. This will help people who are teaching, wiriting tutorials and books to stay up to date for longer. We will obviously fix bugs and add new boards to the core as they appear and you should expect everything in 1.0 onward to work properly.
At the same time this allows us to open up other streams for developing “experimental” distributions that are more cutting edge that are more appealing to people with more experience that are willing to trade some stability with more performance and new features.
The schedule for 1.0 release will be as follows: we’ll start a public discussion on the API for 1.0 which will last into February. At that time, we’ll summariseall the suggestions, and incorporate those that we consider coherent with the philosophy of simplicity and ease of use.
In march, during the NYU spring break, we’ll meet up at ITP in New York to exchange notes and test our assumptions followed by a social event somewhere in town (we’ll have more details about this as we are organising it right now)
We should expect to be able to go “Uno punto Zero” by June.
We also recognise that our website has been in need of love for quite a while and we have started working on a new infrastructure where we’ll better integrate its three main elements (Main site, forum and playground) both graphically and technically. A new forum platform is in the works as we try to find a solution that will let us migrate all the immensely valuable content of the current forum without losing a single bit of it.
The main website will become, in the long run, a much more general resource for people learning about Physical Computing and Arduino. There are some amazing tutorials on the playground and around the web, collecting and organising them will provide us with a great resource for learners and we hope to recognize those contributions by including more of them in the main site
Hardware-wise we’re working on some new ideas on how to make Arduino even simpler to use and more affordable. At the same time we’re looking at how, applying the Arduino Philosophy, we can make some other areas of technology more approachable for everybody.
Today everyone of us is working on their new years resolutions, these are ours and we hope you’ll be excited as we are to work on it.
Massimo on behalf of the Arduino team
January 1st, 2010 at 11:59:28
I’m wishing you the best of luck with this. Really one of the most interesting initiatives I know.
January 1st, 2010 at 18:07:28
Good job, Boss, good job 🙂
January 1st, 2010 at 18:45:58
Great job guys!!!
And all the best for the new year!
One request:
Please have something like http://www.stackoverflow.com for the forum.
That platform is also used hear for electronics: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/
January 1st, 2010 at 21:29:07
Thank you SO much. This project IS the keystone to making my dreams a reality. I’m very grateful for all your hard work and look forward to contributing back to the community much more in the years to come.
January 2nd, 2010 at 03:32:19
Happy New Years from everyone at SparkFun.com!
January 2nd, 2010 at 05:06:54
We will be glad to contribute from my country (Venezuela) to have more and more arduino lovers!!! Thanks to the arduino team for such an adictive devices!!!
WeFrom Venezuela we’ll be
January 2nd, 2010 at 22:03:11
I like the ideas behind the Arduino a lot. And with more and more people start porting the Arduino “language” and libs to other microcontrollers these days, it would be a nice thing to see things stay compatible (as far as APIs, conventions and the spirit are concerned). What about a more “multiplatform” scope? Not in a sense of making/maintaining ports, of course, but by broadening and promoting the concept (APIs, language conventions, “standards”) across platforms? A tiny bit of a “Java touch”?
Having a common environment (language, APIs, conventions) across different MCUs would be a big gain for the Arduino community, I think. On the other hand, having ten or twelve different “Arduino” ports (environments) on different MCUs, each evolving and adding extensions in its own incompatible way, would be a great loss.
Just my thoughts.
January 3rd, 2010 at 15:29:58
Great news! Congratulations on maturing the platform to the point to the level of a 1.0 release. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend the social meet and am looking forward to it.
January 4th, 2010 at 17:05:07
Awesome, glad to hear it massimo.
Nice SEO effort sparkfun, but it’s a nofollow link. 😉
January 5th, 2010 at 15:14:50
Truly an impressive story of success in both commercial and os way.
Besides that it’s nice to see that improvement is going on and that you plan to transform all the different web-parts into a single arduino knowledge base 🙂
January 5th, 2010 at 15:55:47
Outstanding! The whole arduino initiative has been a kick to watch and participate in.
January 5th, 2010 at 22:42:10
Best wishes and thanks for all the effort!
Just 1 tiny newyears wish: standard spacing between digital pin 7 & 8 on future Arduino’s!
Good luck with 1.0!
January 7th, 2010 at 20:47:06
It’s tough to do a fine thing modestly and within a huge social matrix without seriously screwing up, and the arduino project is all that. The arduino is so… simple, but I appreciate how much effort it takes to make it stay clear and on target. It’s been get to use, greedily for myself, and to teach to others, because it stays in the background and becomes a nice medium for expression.
January 8th, 2010 at 19:07:18
Thankyou for your efforts, Arduino is a truly amazing concept. I can’t wait to see what extra modules come along and hope that 2010 is an even better year for the UK distrbutors to stock even more Arduino components.
January 8th, 2010 at 19:50:53
Arduino rocks… 1.0 will make us all happier 🙂
February 4th, 2010 at 11:10:18
[…] the server. The team is working hard preparing the NYU March meeting, as Massimo mentioned on the Uno Punto Zero post: In march, during the NYU spring break, we’ll meet up at ITP in New York to exchange notes […]
February 10th, 2010 at 05:55:45
Tough task to balance usability and flexibility
It takes some serious genius and great design to accomplish this.
I’m confident the arduino team will keep this up.
And I look forwards to see how Arduino will continue to shape and encourage the design landscape
February 23rd, 2010 at 13:35:14
[…] January 1st, we announced that we’re working towards Arduino 1.0 (for details, see this post). Our goal is to stabilize the platform so that it’s supportable and a good foundation for […]
February 23rd, 2010 at 15:07:40
[…] January 1st, we announced that we’re working towards Arduino 1.0 (for details, see this post). Our goal is to stabilize the platform so that it’s supportable and a good foundation for future […]
February 23rd, 2010 at 16:03:47
[…] in January the Arduino team announced they are working towards Arduino 1.0. With this survey they are asking […]
February 25th, 2010 at 09:47:04
v.18 still does not run fine on Windows Vista/7. When all the bugs will be fixed? Weeks, months…? I am still stacked running v.16, the only one that runs fine…
Thanks…
J.E.
February 26th, 2010 at 15:07:31
J.E. have you posted in the forum? 0018 and 0017 run on lots of Windows Vista and 7 machines, so we should try to figure out what doesn’t work for you.
June 22nd, 2010 at 14:16:35
Heey,
Im thinking about buying a arduino but i think I might wait for a new one to come…
Just keep up with your awesome boards!
Greetzz, Jaap
September 18th, 2010 at 01:59:47
something should be done to fix the automatic reset problems. there has to be a better way other then modding the hardware.
October 7th, 2010 at 11:02:40
[…] It is actively being developed, which is always good […]