Arduino is an initiative aiming to provide the design and art community with a tool to create alternative electronic interfaces. It is an opensource physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board and a development environment that implements the Processing/Wiring language. Arduino can be used to develop stand-alone interactive objects or can be connected to software 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. They can act as more natural bonds to computers and digital artifacts in general, allowing us (humans) to interact in new, unforeseen ways.

The project was born from the need of having a set of tools to conduct courses in electronics prototyping at art and design universities. We wanted to unify the work in form and function, through providing designers and artists with access to the essence of digital technologies. We also see the need to democratize the tools. We wanted to create something that would work in a very complex scenario like a designer having a five year old computer running on a free operating system in Venezuela, but also in the fanciest laptop at a design-bureau in London. We didn’t want to have different educational models for both situations, and work in creating tools that can make the dissemination of contents equal to everyone.

Even though the project hasn’t reached its first year, we have estimated that the community is growing at a pace of 40 boards/day. More than 20 universities are using Arduino in their education programs, some of them for their engineering classes. Several open source (and free software) communities have welcomed Arduino as their platform for interfacing the physical world.

The whole project is under a Creative Commons license that allows other people to manufacture their own boards.