The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2005–2015
Arduino made electronics and programming accessible by opening its hardware.
Arduino released an open-source microcontroller board and IDE, so students, hobbyists and designers could build physical things.
Arduino
the move
Building interactive electronics used to take a specialist: a microcontroller, a toolchain and a circuit all with a steep learning curve, so students and makers hit a wall.
Arduino put a low-cost, programmable board together with a simple development environment and opened the design, letting a worldwide community contribute code, libraries and documentation.
Mission-driven and community-supported, Arduino became the standard entry point to electronics and physical computing for education and prototyping.
why it works
- An open design lets others build compatible boards and accessories, growing the ecosystem
- A simple IDE and library ecosystem compress the learning curve
- A large community writes tutorials and solves problems, so help is cheap and abundant
- Widely available low-cost hardware makes the platform reachable for students and hobbyists
what transfers
If the barrier is a learning curve, open the platform and let the community write the tutorials and add the parts; the product becomes its own distribution channel.
what came after
Arduino became a cornerstone of the maker movement and of hardware education, with an enormous ecosystem of 'shields', clones and libraries. Its open-hardware model influenced the wider open-source-hardware movement and how products are designed for educational and maker audiences.
references
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