Hasta La Ideas

The Wall Street Journal has published an extensive article on the open source hardware movement, as exemplified by the Arduino initiative and the people behind it.

“The Arduino got its start at the Interaction Design Institute in the city of Ivrea, Italy, in 2005. Professor Massimo Banzi was looking for a way to make it easier for the design students there to work with technology. He discussed his problem with David Cuartielles, an engineer visiting from Malmö University in Sweden, and they decided to make a microcontroller that designers could incorporate into their work.

Engineers use programmable microcontrollers for prototyping new products, but the two professors viewed these as too difficult to work with, and too expensive, for their design students.

They enlisted two students with backgrounds in computer programming to write software for the device and asked Mr. Martino to build the first 200 microcontrollers. They named it Arduino–after a local bar. Knowing that the Interaction Design Institute would close down the following year, they made it open source.”

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