Arduino filled a huge gap between the world, the elite, hardware
engineers and firmware engineers and common people. We can take complexity and
we will scramble it in a way that we can make it simple and accessible. So I think
Arduino enabled, gave a chance to a huge amount of people to be creators and
enablers of technology. Arduino started as a hacker group within an
interaction design institution in Iberia. And they used to meet in a bar. They
spotted this name of the bar that was Arduino and was named after an
Italian king. So, basically the bar was named after the king and Arduino
was named after the bar.
It quickly evolved into something much, much
bigger because this became a very easy to use tool for everyone. You make it
accessible to very young people and you make it amusing for them and that is,
and that is very very very beautiful, beautiful thing. I mean, what's
really started as a way for artists and creative people to express themselves
became a tool that is so easy to use, that it's used everywhere to prototype
quickly, even very complex applications.
When I was a kid, I took apart our VCR and you can look at that and understand
at a basic level what's happening. Now, you look at new products and you have no
idea what you're looking at. And if we're gonna continue to churn out new
engineers and scientists and people who want to build these sorts of things,
these people need access to things that they can dissect. So, the latest project
in my book for using a stepper motor is a simple chronograph but one of the nice
things about Arduino is, it's an excellent platform for
not just doing things in a recipe book, duplicating things that someone else has
done but understanding why they work and you can operate at this higher level
while using the platform which is nice. But, you can also quite easily get into
learning at the more physics level why electronics are working the way that
they're working. You can enjoy the fact that you're not just a consumer of
electronics but you can become someone who understands what's behind.
You can do basically anything with an Arduino, a hot glue gun, and popsicle sticks. The design
process in Arduino is very different from a pure engineering work. In Arduino,
the focus is with the user. Is the user really needing this and how will you use it?
If you start asking these questions first, then you start to migrate from the
engineering point of view which is, I want to squeeze as many features as
possible, it must be technically challenging and so on to something meant
for users of any kind. Programming the microcontroller can be really
complicated and Arduino really democratized this process by saying, you
have a USB cable? You can program a microcontroller. And that's huge and it's
why I still come back to using the Arduino as a prototyping platform all
the time. One of the great things for me about using the Arduino as a prototyping
platform is feel like a kind of experiment as I go and I don't
necessarily have to have the entire project in mind when I start working on
it. And sometimes, that's the most fun way to learn about things. A great engineer
should be very open-minded. I didn't know if I wanted to become an artist or a
physicist. Then I ended up with a PhD in physics but hahaha. In this reality, you can be
both creative and methodic. Our product families are now made of
much more complex hardware design. We wanted to support also a different way
of manufacturing products, looking after the entire lifecycle management. As a
professional electrical engineer working at Shaper where we make handheld
robotic power tools, for much of our factory test fixtures, we use Arduino
based electronics. I can make something that's custom suited to do exactly what
we want, exactly the way we want to do it. For the key parts of the schematic that
I want to duplicate, I'll just recreate the schematic in Altium Designer and
then i just go to town on whatever other features I need to do. These power
various calibration routines, it's so ideal for this sort of stuff. It's really
very important to have hardware design seen as close as possible to software
design. So iterations must become much faster and collaboration must use modern
tools. The potential that you can exploit by combining the hardware and the cloud
it's, it's really immense. So we are investing heavily in Research and Development
because I think we haven't scratched, there is no limit to what can be done
with this technology. A good Arduino user should be creative. Yeah, someone is
going to put a board on the moon. Haha, It is very impressive!
There is a company who's launched our boards in space and they are doing
experiments in the International Space Station. So, actually, you can purchase a
kit which allows you to do physics experiments at home, to simulate
exactly the same experiment and see what's different. So you can really find
Arduino stuff everywhere. It's just impressive! So, when you have millions of
people that work on projects, the power, the collective power of the
community I think is a very strong thing and it's important that we keep not only
taking from the community but also giving back to the community. As what I
learned from life is that it is good to share. Whenever you listen to a
pitch of a startup, they claim at the end of the pitch "and we are going to change
the world with this technology". I think among all the startups that claim to
change the world, Arduino changed the world already by providing this
democratization of technology that made the difference.
Thank you for watching Altium Stories! If you enjoyed what you've seen, please give
us a like and share the video and don't forget to subscribe!
We'd love to hear what you think so please leave a comment in the section
below.