Arduino 1.0 now available | Hacker News Reader

Arduino 1.0 now available

arduino.cc

115 pointsjipumarino16 comments

This has been interesting to watch, from the Summer of 2007 when the Dicemelia was released (that was my first exposure to Arduino) until the 1.0 release today, its come a long way.

Perhaps one of the more interesting things for me is that the open source nature of the hardware has allowed a number of new businesses to flourish and grow and innovate. This lesson has been too often lost in the rent-seeking behavior of the 90's where 'owning the one toll booth on the road' was considered the height of success. We need to help companies see how creating an open infrastructure lifts all boats, and sure if you don't execute well you might get left behind but the whole market is grown much more quickly.

Also around 2008 I met with an executive at Plastic Logic (they were going to make an E-reader available in January of 2009). When he explained to me that they were building the screens (the thing they invented), writing the software, and designing the reader I knew that his company was already dead. I tried to explain it to him, the market was young, use your special sauce to develop expertise in the screen space selling to everyone, and once you're profitable expand into the space. But he wouldn't hear it, they had this killer tech that no one could touch and the only way to 'maximize company value' was to own everything from the reader design right up through the relationships with content providers. While I certainly could have been wrong, I knew that history was on my side. Sadly I wasn't wrong. They never produced a product (although they did take pre-orders once).

The Arduino was the exact opposite, anyone can make them, arduinio.cc providing a sort of architectural glue to keep them consistent and the message on track. Now, nearly five years later they have made Atmel the envy of every embedded processor vendor and have introduced perhaps hundreds of thousands of people to programming, computers, and technology. Way to dent the universe guys! I salute you.

I've just recently bought my first Arduino, the Uno, to play around with. The only thing I'm a little surprised at is how much they intend you to rely on the somewhat clunky Java based UI.

I would prefer to see some kind of CLI / shell only build system (Makefile or something else) be given a bit more attention by the official releases. As it is, it seems like a bit of an afterthought.

The Arduino is just an 8bit AVR microcontroller at heart. You can program it with avrdude, and write straight C using avr-gcc.

Personally, I use Atmel's development boards and AVR Studio under VMware.

This is generally a more friendly way to get people going, but the editor is awful. I tend to use emacs quite a bit.

Note that the Arduino IDE does ship with Makefiles for doing builds and installations via the CLI.

In fact, on debian, there's an "arduino-core" core package that contains all the parts you need without the GUI (or java for that matter). I run it on an ARM-based Linux box I've got.

First, here are the docs on what the GUI does:

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/BuildProcess

That alone should be enough to get you going -- it's a pretty straightforward compile+link+upload process, with only a funky preprocessor that makes their language easier to deal with than C or C++ for beginners (doesn't require includes or care about order of function declaration | prototyes ).

http://www.obdev.at/products/crosspack/index-de.html

Try CrossPack if you're on OSX. It's exactly what you ask for - just wipe the Adrduino stuff off the chip and use it like a regular AVR development board. You can just write regular C code.

Arduino geeks,

Not sure if this will be considered off topic here; but I will ask anyways.

I am looking for recommendation on how to start with Arduino.

As a hobby, I teach kids 10-14 yrs (started with my nephews) about Computing technologies. I teach programming concepts using 'Scratch'. But I also want to introduce them to Hardware and Communications side of it. For my nephews, I got them Lego Mindstorm NXT and taught them about sensors, motors etc.

However, Mindstrom NXT kit is not cheap. And I cannot expect every kid's parent to fork out that much money. Do you think Arduino can help here? The selection of boards seems confusing to me. Anyone you would recommend for starters?

I can heartily recommend a starter kit like the ones that oomlout sell - http://www.oomlout.co.uk/arduino-experimentation-kit-ardx-p-... for example. I bought one in summer 2010. They come with a good selection of examples that you can assemble with the various parts that it comes with, so takes a lot of the uncertainty out of what you need if, like me, you're more of a software than a hardware guy and not sure what resistors should be paired with which LEDs etc.

The oomlout kit mentioned is the best place to start for you. You probably won't need one of those for every kid though, the guides that come with it are on their website and once you know what activities you want to teach you can just buy the components required. The Arduino to start with is the Arduino Uno (£22, $30)

Have a look at the (well illustrated!) examples provided with the Arduino software too: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage

In my case, I am the one buying the kits. I have many NXT 2.0 kits and also a nice environment for hardware production with the arduino platform (with everything even an oscilloscope). Usually, the Legos are used for the younger kids, and if they are more attracted to building stuff than programming then they fork into the open hardware tracks. My advice is to work through projects. Just how real life works, and what the kids find more interesting: there is a problem to solve or an specification on what they want to build, and from that you and them sit down, organize your thoughts, make the design, and then build it, test it, improve it. They love it, it works very well, and keeps you doing very very interesting stuff always with something different. A completely hands on experience, and they learn by doing. As for which arduino kit you would use, anyone will do it. But when they are just starting with arduino, maybe it's better to keep it simple (but always as a part of solving a problem, not doing it to "learn how to turn a LED on"). The best thing is to locate a store and work always with them, so look at what kits they have and choose from there. That's how I do it here in Germany, and worked very well. If you yourself have no experience on arduino or open hardware, I recommend you to choose some book to build little projects from it, so your choice of the kit will be dictated by the kit used on the book. Anyway, congrats for the teaching!

I work on my own teaching robotics and programming to kids from 6 to 14 years old here in Germany (in different languages, many foreigners here), and this is very good news!! I love this platform, and having a polished product for the kids jumping into it is great.

I just bought an Uno Makershed kit last weekend. I am still somewhere just past hello world in my understanding of the interface, to be sure, because my hardware experience is limited to having used LEGO-LOGO back in the 80s as a kid.

But then again this seems a lot easier to get my head around than I imagined it would. I might go so far as to call Arduino a LEGO-LOGO that grew up, moved out of its parent's house, and got a job.

And the same day that Makershed shipped me my first Uno, no less.

Same problem here. I ordered one "UNO kit" for my little girl :) .

If I understand correctly this is only a software update. Is it true? The new software will work with all the models? Or it is a new (incompatible) board?

It's just a software update. People can and have ported Arduino to a lot more than the ATMega series. Breaking that compatibility isn't something they'd do lightly; it's why the Arduino still has the funky pin spacings.

My dad gave me a hand-me-down basic stamp microcontroller a while back. It had a db9 serial interface. Well, I grid working with it: keyword being tried.

This basic stamp made by parallax was powered by a 9v battery, and only the battery. The serial port used something that multiple usb2serial cables wouldn't work with, but their expensive cable worked. Because of this, I had to develop on a windows machine (no compiler for Linux at that time). And because my only hardware serial portted machine was a Linux box, had to run windows over virtualbox. My workflow went upwards of 10 minutes per try. Overall, there was major suckage, and that's not to mention the BASIC language that was forced.

I just bought an arduino UNO. I went from "hmm" to Theremin-ish device in about 30 minutes using a piezo speaker, pot, and a LDR/LED combo (and misc resistors). I played with the hardware and code seamlessly, and updating the board took 10 seconds. And I just today ordered a 17$ bluetooth shield. I'm working on a PID/motor board as well for miscellaneous motors I have.

The arduino is actually enjoyable and fun to do stuff with.

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