Edward Lynch

HNRS 2020
How the Arduino Fuels Innovation and Encourages Sharing
According to the makers of Arduino, Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping
platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers,
hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments [1]. There are
variations of the hardware, but essentially, one buys a circuit board that has various pins to connect to
external circuits to, a slot to connect to shields, and a USB connection to connect to your computer.
Shields are boards that can be plugged on top of the Arduino PCB extending its capabilities. The
different shields follow the same philosophy as the original toolkit: they are easy to mount, and cheap to
produce [1]. Using the USB connection, one uses a personal computer to program code, to then be
compiled and loaded onto the device. Arduino is inexpensive, programmable, open source hardware
that can be used a myriad of different ways which have huge implications in education and
communities.
Massimo Banzi, one of the inventors of the Arduino, gave a talk at TEDGlobal 2012 called How
Arduino is open-sourcing imagination [2]. In it, he showcases many examples of what people have
created using this technology. The Arducopter is a small, remote control helicopter. A startup
company called Matternet figured out that this could be used to transport goods from village to village
in Africa. The Enough Already uses Arduino to mute the TV when an overly talked about persons
name is mentioned. Arduino boards are even being used in CERNs Large Hadron Collider. Another
project, the txtBomber uses the Arduino to control solenoids that release paint from spray paint cans.
The device is rolled along a wall so that a predetermined, often political message is painted in neat print
onto the wall. The possibilities with Arduino are limitless. Typically, these creations are created by one
person because, with Arduino, that person has all the tools they need. These designs for these devices
can in be shared in places like Make Magazine or online at sites like instructables.com or they can be
turned into a fully commercialized product. The Pebble, a soon to be released smart watch, was actually
prototyped using Arduino and an old Nokia phones screen. With the prototype made, the company
used a website called kickstarter.com to ask for donations so that they could begin production. Their
goal was to raise $100,000. They received a total of $10,266,845. These are just a few of the thousands
and thousands of devices that people have created using Arduino as a tool.
This device has unleashed the massive potential of our population to create electronics. The
existence of Arduino has great effects on community as well as in education. One may wonder: If most
or all the sharing of Arduino based designs is online, is it truly increasing our human connections and
improving our sense of community? The answer is yes, it is because it encourages the building of
physical devices. Physical objects are what we can all relate to on a fundamental level. But if cell
phones are physical and they sometimes cause us to be lonelier, as described by Sherry Turkle in Alone
Together, how is Arduino different? The answer lies in the nature of Arduino based inventions. With
the exception of The Pebble, Arduino projects usually perform highly specialized tasks, rather than a
variety of tasks. That task is determined by a creative person with a vision and a goal in mind. The goal
is usually to solve a single problem. This allows the device to not be distracting in nature by having only
a few capabilities.
While some Arduino projects seem silly, like the chair that tweets when someone passes gas,
there have been many profound and meaningful uses for it. Inventor Banzi describes Alerta de Sismos
in his TED talk. A 14 year old boy from Chile made a system which detects earthquakes, and then tweets
a warning and the location of it. As of March 17, 2013 he has 342,349 followers and anticipates this
becoming a government supported project. Clearly, this young boy is providing a much needed service
to his community, and it surely did not cost much. The various Arduino boards usually cost about $30 or
less, depending on the type. Arduino has also been utilized to provide a public service after the
Fukushima disaster in Japan caused increased levels of radiation. A group called Tokyo Hackerspace
created about 100 Geiger counters, which measure radiation levels, with a network interface attached.
These counters were then distributed across Japan and the measurements were posted on a map on a
website. This was extremely helpful because the information that the government was providing was
not truly open and was not always accurate.
Arduino can also be used as a tool for education because it encourages creativity. Banzi
describes kids who made a football playing robot and became world champions in robot competitions
with their Arduino based robot. If kids are capable of building robots on their own, how easy would it
be to have robotics classes at a young age in the school system? Teaching programming skills is helpful
because it is simply logic in text form and it is relevant learning material for todays generation because
of the high prevalence of technology in our society. Even if a child who learns these skills does not go on
to use them directly, they will still have had an opportunity to be creative in a technical setting and they
will have a much better understanding of what electronic devices actually are. This could even be
helpful in Sherry Turkles goal of getting people to understand that even devices that exhibit behavior
are not human and are fundamentally different. By putting a kid in a position where he is designing the
inner workings of such a thing, they can better understand that electronics are not beings, but tools that
only do exactly what they are programmed to.
Arduino can have even more relevancy in education for college students taking electrical
engineering courses. At Columbia University, John Sairk and Ioannis Kymissis devised a way to use
Arduino as the core piece of technology for a lab kit that could be used either by students in an on
campus lab or by off campus students, remotely. This study suggests that the method could be used for
taking lab courses online [3]. The students in the class were from various disciplines and therefore some
had limited experience with hardware and software. The students purchased the lab kit with the
Arduino for $100, just as one would buy a textbook. The cost saving potential of these kits is huge. In
previous versions of the course, students used a $2450 spectrometer and a $3400 luminance meter to
take measurements. While the Arduino based solution could not offer as detailed data, the cost of the
color-light-to-frequency converter had a cost of only $4. In another previous experiment at the same
Columbia course, in order to learn about driving displays, students made their own displays using
expensive equipment and then had to share a single paid programmer to program their boards for them
because many of them did not know assembly language. In the new, Arduino based version of the
experiment, students used commercially available screens so that they could focus on programming the
drive for the displays. This allowed students to actually modify and troubleshoot their own code. The 2
students taking the course remotely, who had some experience, were still able to learn a lot from the
course, with one of them even designing a LED version of pong. When they needed help, they could
usually get their questions answered via email or online video chat. The Arduino based lab kits were
effective at saving money, allowing less technical students to create technical projects, and for students
to take what was traditionally a lab course, remotely.
Arduino promotes invention and it promotes play. As discussed in class, much of our learning
comes through play. Arduino allows anyone to be playful with a modern toy. It builds communities of
people who share their ideas and designs. Arduino builds communities through the devices that it
powers. It lets us all become inventors of technology to help us understand what technology is and that
technology is not a person. Arduino is an open sourced product that actually contains many previous
smaller open source components. Therefore, it is through sharing that we can create stronger
communities and better education.

[1] "Arduino - HomePage." Arduino - HomePage. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Mar. 2013. <http://arduino.cc/en/>.
[2] "Massimo Banzi: How Arduino Is Open-sourcing Imagination." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. N.p., n.d.
Web. 17 Mar. 2013.
[3] Sarik, John, and Ioannis Kymissis. Lab Kits Using the Arduino Prototyping Platform. N.p., 2010. Web.
17 Mar. 2013. <http://fie-conference.org/fie2010/papers/1296.pdf>.