[Jennifer Bove] interviewed Massimo in the series of portraits she is making to introduce the IxDA awards. BTW, don’t miss the chance to join, the deadline has been post-poned till October the 1st.
1- What is your favorite product, digital or otherwise, to use, and why?
When I was 8 years old my dad gave me a Braun Lectron Electronics Kit. It was packaged like a book. On the left side there was an actual book you could pop out that explained how electronics work using hand-drawn bubbles that kids could understand, followed by very clean and simple instructions on how to assemble the modules. Then on the right there was a play area made of metal, where you could make various projects and then neatly store away the building blocks when you were done. You could just close up the book afterwards and put it on the book shelf.
read the complete interview
Michael Mari is the author of Arduino Cookbook, a collection of projects utilizing the physical computing platform of Arduino. He was on hand at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 to discuss Arduino and his book, published by O’Reilly Media.
Subscribe to the Maker Faire Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube and Vimeo.
Check out more videos from Maker Faire Bay Area 2011.
More:
In the Maker Shed:
Arduino Cookbook
Create your own robots, toys, remote controllers, alarms, detectors, and more with Arduino and this guide. Arduino lets artists and designers build a variety of amazing objects and prototypes that interact with the physical world. With this Cookbook, you can dive right in and experiment, thanks to more than a hundred tips and techniques, no matter what your skill level. Here you’ll find the examples and advice you need to begin, expand, and enhance your projects right away.
As we are approaching to the first official Arduino 1.0, we thought we could take some time to understand better the different libraries for Arduino out there including the state of compatibility with 1.0.
Massimo on the [Forum]:
At the moment , finding a library for Arduino is quite complex for a user (especially for beginners) because there is no official registry of libraries and some these libraries are abandoned although they might still be useful with some maintenance.
As part of the current effort to open up as many parts of the Arduino process as possibile we have thought about how to improve the situation and here are some actions undertaken right now:
1. we are working on a database of every Arduino library available. This will be published on our website as soon as it’s done. In the meantime library authors can help us by entering their library in the “database” through this link
http://bit.ly/ArduinoLibrarySurvey
Please add your library specifying all the required info so that we can contact you in case we need more info.
The only requirement is that the library must run on at least one of the boards listed in the Arduino IDE.
2. We have created a new repository for Arduino Libraries on github available here: https://github.com/organizations/arduino-libraries
we encourage every library author to migrate their code there (especially if they are not using a sourcecode repository) . We’ll create projects for each library managed by the original library author. This will allow each library to have a documentation page and an issue management page.
In the future we expect this repository to be part of a system that will make it very easy for the users to select and install libraries directly from the ide being warned of any update available for the ones they currently have installed.
It’s a bit of a large project in a way but in the long run it will create a nice repository of very useful code.
I hope you will join this exciting project!!!
As usual comments and suggestions are welcome.
