How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination - Massimo Banzi

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave this toy car to his eight-year-old son. But instead of going into a store and buying one like we do normally, he went to this website, downloaded the file, and then printed it on this printer. So this idea that you can manufacture objects digitally using these machines is something that The Economist magazine defined as the third Industrial Revolution. Actually, I argue that there is another revolution going on, and it's the one that has to do with open-source hardware and the makers movement.

Because the printer that my friend used to print a toy is actually open source. So you go to the same website, you can download all the files that you need in order to make that printer: the construction files, the hardware, the software, all the instructions is there. And also, this is part of a large community where there are thousands of people around the world that are actually making these kinds of printers. There's a lot of innovation happening because it's all open source; you don't need anybody's permission to create something great.

That space is like, you know, the personal computer in 1976, like the Apples, where the other companies are fighting. We will see in a few years there would be the Apple of this kind of market come out. Well, there's also another interesting thing that I said: the electronics is open-source because at the heart of this printer, that is something I really attached to, is this Arduino board. So the motherboard, the sort of powers this printer, is the project I've been working on for the past seven years. It's an open-source project.

I work with these friends of mine that I have here: the five of us—two Americans, two Italians, and a Spaniard—with, you know, it's a worldwide project. We came together in this design institute called the Interaction Design Institute, which was teaching interaction design. This idea that you can take design from the simple shape of an object and you can move it forward to design the way you interact with things. Well, when you design an object, it's supposed to interact with a human being. If you make a full model of a mobile phone, it doesn't make any sense. You have to have something that actually interacts with people.

So we worked on Arduino and a lot of other projects there to create platforms that would be simple for our students to use so that our students could just build things that worked. But they don't have five years to become an electronics engineer; we have one month. So how do I make something that even a kid can use? Actually, with Arduino, we have kids like Sylvia, do you see here, that actually make projects with Arduino. I have 11-year-old kids stop me and show me, like, stuff they built for Arduino. That's really scary to see the capabilities that kids have when you give them the tools.

So let's look at what happens when you make a tool that anybody can just pick up and build something quickly. One of the examples that I like to sort of kick off this discussion is this example of this cat feeder. The gentleman who made this project had two cats; one was sick and the other one was healthy. So he had to make sure they ate the proper food. He made this thing that recognizes the cat from a chip mounted insert on the collar of the cat and opens the door so the cat can eat the food. This is made by recycling an old CD player that you can get from an old computer, some cardboard tape, a couple of sensors, a few blinking LEDs, and then suddenly you have a tool. You build something that you cannot find on the market.

You know, I like this phrase, “Crack on each.” If you have an idea, you just go and you make it. This is the equivalent of sketching on paper than with electronics. So one of the features that I think is important about our work is that our hardware, on top of being made with love in Italy, as you can see from there, so the back of the circuit is that it's open. So we publish all the design files for the circuit online, so you can download it and you can actually use it to make something or to modify to learn. You know, when I was learning about programming, I learned by looking at other people's code or looking at other people's circuits on magazines. This is a good way to learn by looking at other people's work.

So the different elements of the project are all open. The hardware is released with a Creative Commons license, so, you know, I like this idea that hardware becomes like a piece of culture that you share and you build upon, like it was a song or a poem. You know, with Creative Commons, the software is GPL, so it's open source as well. The documentation and the hands-on teaching methodology is also open source and released as the Creative Commons. Just the name is protected so that we can make sure that we can tell people what is ours and what isn’t.

Arduino itself is made of a lot of different open-source components that may be individually hard to use for, like, a twelve-year-old kid. But Arduino grabs everything together into a mash-up of open-source technologies where we try to give them the best user experience to get something done quickly. So you have situations like this where some people in Chile decided to make their own boards instead of buying them to organize a workshop and save money. Or there are companies that make their own variations of Arduino that fit in a certain market, and that's probably of maybe like a hundred and fifty or ten or something at the moment. This one is made by a company called Adafruit, which is run by this woman called Limor Fried, also known as Ladyada. She is one of the heroes of the open-source hardware movement and the maker movement.

So this idea that you have a new sort of turbocharged DIY community that believes in open-source, in collaboration, collaborates online, collaborates in different spaces. There is this magazine called Make that sort of gathered all these people and sort of put them together as a community. You see, like, very technical projects explained in a very simple language, beautifully typeset. Or you have websites like this one, like Instructables, where people actually teach each other about anything. So this one is about Arduino projects, the page you see on the screen, but effectively here you can learn how to make a cake and everything.

So let's look at some projects. This one is a quadcopter; it's a small model helicopter. Anyway, it's a toy now, and this one was military technology a few years ago, and now it's open-source, easy to use. You can buy it online. DIY Drones is the community that does this new thing called R2 Copter. But then somebody actually launched a startup called Materlight when they figured out that you could use these to actually transport things from one village to another in Africa. The fact that this was easy to find, open-source, easy to hack, enabled them to prototype their company really quickly.

Other projects: I'm getting a little sick of hearing about the same people on TV over and over and over again, so I decided to do something about it. This Arduino project, which I called the Enough Already, will mute the TV anytime any of these overexposed personalities is mentioned. I'll show you how I make it. Our producers caught up with Kim Kardashian earlier today to find out what she was planning on wearing—it should do a pretty good job of protecting our ears from having to hear about the details of Kim Kardashian's wedding.

Okay, so, you know, again, what do you think this thing here is? Matt found this module that lets Arduino process TV signals. He found some code written by somebody else that generates infrared signals for the TV, put it together, and created this great project. It's also used in other venues, using serious places, like, you know, the Large Hadron Collider. There are some Arduino boards collecting data and sort of measure some parameters, or it's used for… So this is a musical interface built by a student from Italy and is now turning this into a product because it was a student project becoming a brother.

It can be used to make an assistive device. This is a glove that understands the sign language and transforms the gestures that you make into sounds and writes the words that you're signing on a display. Again, this is made of all different parts you can find on all the websites that sell Arduino-compatible parts, and you assemble it into a project. Or this is a project from the ITP part of NYU where they met with this boy with severe disabilities who can not play with the PS3. So they built this device that allows the kids to play baseball, although it has limited movement capability.

Or you can find it in art projects. So this is the TXT Bomb, where you put a message into this device and then you roll it on the wall. It basically has all these solenoids pressing the buttons on ScribeCams, so you just pull it over a wall and it just writes on the wall all the political messages. Then we have this plant here; this is called Botanicals because this is an Arduino board with a Wi-Fi module in the planter and it's measuring the well-being of the plant that is creating a Twitter account where you can actually interact with the plant. So, you know, this plant will start to say, "This is really hot," or like, "There's a lot of… I need water right now." So it just gives a personality to your plant.

Or this is something that Twitter has when the baby inside the belly of a pregnant woman kicks. Or this is a 14-year-old kid in Chile who made a system that detects earthquakes and publishes it on Twitter. He has 280,000 followers. He is 14 and he anticipated a government project by one year. Or again, another project where by analyzing the Twitter feed of a family, you can basically point where they are, like in the Harry Potter movie. So you can find out everything about this project on the website.

Somebody made a chair that tweets when somebody farts. It's interesting how in 2009, Geez Model basically defined that this project actually gives meaning to Twitter. So, there was a lot changing in between. It's a very serious project. When the Fukushima disaster happened, a bunch of people in Japan realized that the information the government was giving wasn't really sort of open and really reliable. So they built this Geiger counter plus Arduino plus network interface. They made a hundred of them and gave them to people around Japan. Essentially, the data that they gathered gets published on this website called Qasim and other websites they built, so you can actually get reliable real-time information from the field, and you can get unbiased information.

Or this machine here is from the DIY bio movement, and it's one of the steps that you need in order to process DNA. And again, it's completely open-source from the ground up. Or you have students in developing countries making replicas of scientific instruments that cost a lot of money to make. Actually, they just build them themselves for a lot less using Arduino and a few parts. This is a pH probe.

You get kids like these kids from Spain; they learned how to program and to make robots when they were probably like 11. Then they started to use Arduino to make these robots that play football. They became world champions with an Arduino-based robot. So when we had to make our own educational robot, we just went to them and said, "You know, you design because you know exactly what is needed to make a great robot that excites kids, not me. Like, I'm an old guy, what am I supposed to excite?"

But it's like, in terms of educational lessons, there are also companies like Google that are using the technology to create interfaces between mobile phones, tablets, and the real world. The accessory development kit from Google is open-sourced and based on Arduino, as opposed to Apple, which is closed source. "Sign your life to Apple." Here you have… there’s a giant maze, and Joe is sitting there, and the maze is moving when you tilt the tablet.

Also, I come from Italy, and the design is important in Italy, yet very conservative. So we worked with the design studio called Habits in Milan to make this mirror, which is completely open source. This doubles also as an iPod speaker. So the idea is that the hardware, the software, the design of the object, the fabrication—everything about this project is open-source, and you can make it yourself. We want other designers to pick this up and learn how to make great devices, to learn how to make interactive products by starting from something real.

But when you have this idea, you know, what happens to all these ideas? There are like thousands of ideas that I… you know, it would take seven hours for me to do all the… percentage level. I will not take all the seven hours. Thank you. So, but let's start from this example. So the group of people that started this company called Pebble, they prototyped a watch that communicates via Bluetooth with your phone, and you can display information on it. They prototyped with an old LCD screen from a Nokia mobile phone and an Arduino.

Then, when they had a final project, they actually went to Kickstarter and they were asking for $100,000 to make a few of them to sell. They got 10 million dollars; they got a completely fully funded startup, and they don't have to, you know, get VCs' involvement. They just excited people with their great project.

The last project I want to show you is called Art du Sud. It is currently on Kickstarter, so if you want to contribute, please do it. It's a satellite that goes into space, which is probably the least open-source thing you can imagine, and it contains an Arduino connected to a bunch of sensors. So if you know how to use Arduino, you can actually upload your experiments into this satellite and run them. So imagine if you, as a high school, can have the satellite for a week and do satellite space experiments like that.

So, as I said, there are lots of examples. So I'm gonna stop here, and I just want to thank the Arduino community for being the best and just everyday making lots of projects.

Community: “You told me, Elliott, say that you had no idea, of course, that it would take off like that. So, I mean, how much do you feel when you read this stuff and you see what you’ve unlocked?”

Speaker: "Well, you know, it’s the work of a lot of people. So we, as a community, are enabling people to make great stuff, and I just feel overwhelmed. It’s just… I… it’s difficult to describe this. Every morning I wake up and I look at all the stuff that Google Alert sends me, and it’s just amazing. It’s just going into every field that you can imagine."

"Thank you so much."