Most designers had simply never questioned this apparent necessity. It was a pretty standard requirement for any prototyping platform at the time. These proto-UNOs also required you to press a reset button before uploading new code. It was the herald of dual processor experimentation, which piqued the interest of both Arduino users and its designers. Others made HID firmware so they could emulate computer peripherals. Some people created MIDI firmware to send notes to a computer. This opened the door to reprogramming the firmware and making the boards do other things. We found that you could develop a firmware for some simple Atmel processors that worked just the same as FTDI chips, but would liberate us from needing a driver.”
It’s the reason you don’t need a driver for a USB serial port. “Which is when we realized there was this thing called CDC (communications device class) protocol, which was embedded into operating systems.
Great chips, but you had to install drivers to get your computer to recognize devices when you plugged them in.” “Back in the day we used to use FTDI chips,” Massimo recalls. So it’s optimized for education, not for electronic operation!” But to reduce errors when populating the board by hand, I set the diodes facing in the same direction, and the PCB’s tracks take care of orientation. In terms of operation, they’re working in opposite directions to each other. I made sure that components of a similar type and value were together, to minimize mistakes during assembly. “On the original Arduino serial board, look at the components,” says co-founder David Cuartielles, talking about the earliest of Arduino’s self-assembly boards, which were used almost exclusively in the classroom. Looking back, it’s easy to see that this guiding principle was there from the beginning. The notion of an enhanced user experience was very prominent, although the people who would become the founders of Arduino hadn’t necessarily articulated it even to themselves. The journey to the UNO wasn’t short, but it did have a distinct destination. Massimo and David with Arduino CEO, Fabio Violante Driving Towards the Future This was a time when the maker movement was still unrepresented by a defining brand or killer product. Each little quirk, unexpectedly popular feature and, of course, mistake helped to define what makers wanted and needed. They were useability tests, and even marketplace research. These experiments weren’t just a learning experience for electronics design. “The UNO is an arrival point of a large number of small experimentations and incremental improvements,” says co-founder Massimo Banzi. Moreover, its name was chosen to mark a point in Arduino’s story where the business itself came out of beta and into version 1.0. It would eventually give birth to the Arduino UNO, but despite its name meaning “one,” this is far from Arduino’s first board.
I don’t think anyone on that team would object to such a definition.įorged in the crucible of a classroom, the idea of an accessible, affordable electronics development platform was under serious investigation. A team that Make: Magazine once referred to as “designers, teachers, artists, and techno-hippies.” Rise of the Techno-Hippiesīy 2009, the team that would become Arduino was gathering steam. Put on your rose-tinted spectacles, and let’s wax poetic about the origins of this beloved maker board. As familiar as we all are with the UNO, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about the iconic Arduino microcontroller board.