Arduino Mashes Up OSS with Modular Hardware
by Sam Dean - Oct. 20, 2008Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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Have you ever heard of Arduino? It's billed as an open source electronics prototyping platform, and proponents claim that it could lead to devices capable of interaction not seen on today's computers. I'd say it's not entirely open source for several reasons, but it does leverage open source software components and an inexpensive starter hardware platform following many of the principles that open source projects follow. O'Reilly has just announced a $12.99 new book called Getting Started with Arduino, intended to kick-start new Arduino projects.
The MAKE blog, which specializes in do-ity-yourself (DIY) project information has covered both the O'Reilly book and the Arduino Starter Kit, which costs $89.99. Their post is here.
That post describes Arduino this way: "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 is open source!"
Once again, I see Arduino as a mix of open source and non-open source components, but it is notable that there are community efforts to produce new devices using the platform and guides such as O'Reilly's book. For example, here is a project designed to leverage Arduino to take regular, time-lapse photos with a Nikon camera.
Arduino isn't the first attempt to bring principles from the open source community to community-driven hardware development. Among other efforts, the folks at Bug Labs have developed a modular hardware and software platform based on Linux that communities of users can leverage to build customized devices running customized software. According to a tweet from the folks at Bug Labs, they won an editor's choice award at the Maker Faire event.
There will be more of these efforts to mix modular hardware with open source software over time. As we've covered before, the robotics community is already committing to this type of model. Heads up tinkerers.
