How a Few Art Teachers' Small Invention a Decade Ago Gave Rise to Today's Smart Hardware Industry

Everyone is talking about makers. How did Arduino, the emblem of the maker movement, start the trend?

"I'm so thirsty. You forgot to water me these past few days." You have just had a phone call from the orchid at home.

This is not science fiction. All you need is a device called Botanicalls, a leaf-shaped circuit board. Stick it in the flowerpot, set it up, and the plant will call you, text you or update its own social media account.

The Botanicalls prototype

Talking about this 2008 project, its creator Rob Faludi still lights up. "If the plant was a hard type to keep alive, we'd make it talk a bit more snootily." Like the Lego robot band, the space capsule a father built for his son, or the cupcake-shaped electric car, Botanicalls exists because its creators see the world with imagination and are not content to sell products off a shelf.

People like Rob Faludi who build whimsical hardware are called makers. The best known of them are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who built personal computers in a garage in the 1970s. Makers are still a niche today, but a niche big enough to catch the public eye. This summer more than 50,000 people came to the Maker Faire in San Francisco. In Shenzhen, the second large-scale Maker Faire drew 100,000 visitors.

Besides strong hands-on skills and a restless curiosity, the term you hear most in maker circles is "Arduino board." Everything from odd hardware gadgets to commercial products that raised tens of millions of dollars, such as the Pebble smartwatch and the MakerBot 3D printer, started from an unremarkable circuit board like this one.

"Fifty years ago, people who wrote software had to wear a white apron and know everything about semiconductors. Now? Even my mother can program," says Massimo Banzi, one of Arduino's founders. "We've made it possible for a lot of people to make products themselves." Before Arduino, you had to understand circuit-board assembly language and the basics of electronic engineering. Arduino still requires programming, but it is now easy enough for amateur software hobbyists.

In its tenth year, the Arduino single-board microcontroller, which costs just US$30, has become the emblem of the maker movement and of open-source hardware. More than 1 million units have been sold worldwide, not counting hundreds of cloned or modified versions. The company behind the board is odd too. It does little marketing, and it places no restrictions on anyone cloning or modifying its boards. The company later split in two, and it even has to enter markets under different names in different parts of the world.

QDaily recently spoke with Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi about how Arduino succeeded ten years ago and where it is headed.

How Did Arduino Take Off?

"We built a community; we didn't do marketing." Massimo repeats this line whenever he discusses Arduino's early success.

Massimo began teaching at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy in 2003. At the time, the school's students were making computer-controlled art projects. But Massimo soon noticed that the students were not very motivated, and most stuck to simple interactive effects.

"They were using the BASIC Stamp controller, a board that cost about US$100. That was too expensive for students, and it took some expertise, so they used it as little as they could," Massimo recalls. That was the original purpose of the Arduino controller: to let the design students build projects for less.

In 2004, Massimo brought in three others to start the project: David Cuartielles, a Spanish semiconductor engineer who was then a visiting researcher at Ivrea, and Massimo's students David Mellis and Nicholas Zambetti. Arduino was named after the bar where they often met.

The Arduino founding team, from left to right: Gianluca Martino, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Massimo Banzi and Tom Igoe

"The students at both schools didn't know technology and didn't want to become technical experts. They just wanted to be designers and artists. They knew microcontrollers were useful and wanted to learn, but they didn't want to take a whole engineering course. So we developed Arduino," recalls Tom Igoe, one of the founding members.

Because it needed no programming background and was cheap, Arduino quickly caught on with students. Massimo began to think about turning it into a product that could be sold worldwide. In 2005 he brought in Tom Igoe, a lecturer at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) with whom he had corresponded by email for years, and Gianluca Martino, who knew manufacturing.

"We had no money for marketing early on, so we just ran some small offline events," Massimo recalls. In 2005, after Arduino went into mass production, Massimo emailed his friends in London, and friends of friends. "We were basically asking whether anyone would pay US$100 to come to an event about a circuit board nobody knew anything about," he says with a laugh.

"Some people actually came. Our first event drew 25 people." There, Massimo showed the Arduino board and the projects that could be built with it, which were things made by the students at Ivrea. "It's been 10 years now, and a dozen or so of those 25 people are still active in our community," Massimo says.

The Arduino Uno board

"The board itself isn't something to show off, but the interesting projects are. A designer doesn't care about the technology itself; he only wants to use it to realize his project. So in the early days we had designer and artist friends use our boards, make works and put those works online."

In 2006, Tom Igoe repeated the approach, bringing the board to New York University for students to use and encouraging them to post their work on a website. Botanicalls, the plant-calling project at the start of this article, was one of them. That same year, Igoe emailed updates on the project to Dale Dougherty, founder of the maker magazine Make. Soon after Make first wrote about Arduino, Arduino became the new standard in maker circles.

"People used to say, 'I want to learn how to program a microcontroller,' and that was the end goal. Now we say, 'I want to learn microcontroller programming, and then go build a robot,'" Igoe says. He believes the lower barrier to learning has directly changed how people approach hardware.

Lowering the Barrier to Making Hardware

Botanicalls began in 2007. Rob Faludi, then working in a computer lab at New York University, and his five-person team wanted to draw attention to plants and nature, and came up with the idea of a plant that makes phone calls like a person.

But with development work to do every day, they weren't sure how much time to spend on Botanicalls.

"We have plenty of ideas, but we can't put a lot of effort into every one, especially when we don't know whether people will be interested. Thanks to Arduino, the first version of Botanicalls took us only two or three days. When we put the idea out, we found people were very interested. So we turned it into a real product," Rob told QDaily. You can still buy a Botanicalls kit on the hardware platform SparkFun.

Because the concept was fun, Botanicalls appeared twice in The New York Times, and after the project took off, Rob joined Digi International, a company that also serves open-source hardware. Rob told QDaily that although his team had professional skills, Arduino's greatest value was letting them test the market's reaction quickly. "For us, knowing quickly what people think of a product decides whether we pursue it. Arduino gave us that chance."

For people with no programming background, Arduino opened the door to making hardware without much effort.

"Arduino changed my life," another maker, Judy Castro, told us. "Before that, I was a very traditional sculptor."

Coffeebots in the shape of a dragon

Thanks to Arduino, she is now a fairly well-known entrepreneur in education. Her project, Coffeebots, turns discarded coffee cans and an Arduino single-board microcontroller into small robots that move freely. She wants to use it for children's robotics education, giving kids the confidence to approach technology at minimal cost. "I did this without any programming background," Judy says, so she is confident children can do it too.

Arduino has made Judy busier and busier over the past three years. After Make named the coffee-can robots a best project, she took them from San Francisco to the Maker Faire in Shenzhen, visited schools and educational institutions, and gave talks. She also plans to keep up her art. For her next project, she says, she will return to art and use Arduino to drive a motorized crocodile robot.

"Fifty years ago, people who wrote software had to wear a white apron and know everything about semiconductors. Now even my mother can program," Massimo says. "We've made it possible for a lot of people to make products themselves."

Open and Copyable: How Arduino Became an Industry

At the very start, Massimo and his team made an unusual decision: they published Arduino's circuit-board designs and all its hardware design information on their website, under a license from the nonprofit Creative Commons. This turned the Arduino board from a private company's product into a cloneable, redesignable "open-source" hardware project. People who modify Arduino pay the company no licensing fee and need not even tell the Arduino team.

Being "open source" is exactly why Arduino spread so fast and so far. According to the Arduino team, they have sold more than 1 million Arduino boards, and there are now 317 boards derived from Arduino, covering everything from robot-building boards to home controllers. Businesses built on Arduino boards and their offshoots, such as modifying Arduino boards or helping makers go from an Arduino prototype to mass production, have also grown with the open-source hardware wave.

The chip and component retailer SparkFun is one beneficiary of Arduino's rise. This niche e-commerce company supplies assembly kits to DIY enthusiasts, often bundled with reviews and manuals, and makes all its kits open source.

After Arduino took off, SparkFun launched the IOIO microcontroller, designed specifically for Android, which lets developers easily control their creations from Android phones and tablets. By 2014, SparkFun offered more than 3,000 circuit-board products, and its annual revenue had reached US$32 million, triple what it was five years earlier.

Pan Hao of Seeed Studio with Massimo

More and more companies in China are doing the same, and one that must be mentioned is Shenzhen's Seeed Studio. Founded in 2008, the company sells modified boards based on Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, which makers in China and abroad buy to build the products they want, shortening the path from electronics to a working prototype. Seeed Studio's partners include Google, Microsoft and Intel, and its influence on the maker industry runs deeper still: it set up Chaihuo Makerspace, a hardware hackerspace where Chinese makers gather in Shenzhen to build hardware, and it has run the Shenzhen Maker Faire for four years.

Smaller teams have joined in as well, such as Microduino, which started in 2013. It has developed three generations of products and raised more than US$360,000 on Kickstarter over two years, mostly from makers abroad. Others in the same business include Yuandou Technology, pcDuino, and Spark, a foreign team that came to Shenzhen specifically for this.

The chip giants have joined the movement too. This year Intel released a development kit combining an Arduino baseboard with an Edison module, trying to win over Shenzhen's white-label manufacturers and capture more smart-hardware developers. Cooperating and competing at the same time has become the norm between Arduino and Intel.

Qualcomm, a later arrival, released the Dragonboard 410c, a microcontroller aimed at makers, at this year's Shenzhen Maker Faire, hoping to compete with Arduino, Intel and others for the market.

And how is the Arduino founding team doing now?

Although the maker community uses Arduino and its modified boards heavily, the company that created Arduino is not the biggest beneficiary of the maker movement. Because its boards are open source and cloneable, it earns nothing from third-party modified boards.

So in recent years Arduino has tried harder to make money. In 2013, for example, it partnered with Intel to try to bring simplified boards to smaller devices. More recently, it teamed up with Shenzhen's Seeed Studio to launch a local version for the Chinese market, but because of a trademark dispute this product was renamed Genuino.

But the "official" Arduino does not look competitive enough. The 300-plus Arduino "variants" are more specialized and better fit developers' needs, not to mention the cheaper white-label clones.

For many of the people who helped create Arduino, however, how far the company can go no longer matters much. Apart from carrying a backpack to maker fairs around the world every few months to meet makers, Tom Igoe spends most of his time at New York University, guiding students as they use Arduino, cutting machines, electric drills and other tools to turn their whimsical ideas into reality.

Asked what he would do next, Igoe told us: "A few different kinds of timekeeping tools."