Arduino - History

History

In 2005, in Ivrea, Italy (main site of the computer company Olivetti), a project was initiated to make a device for controlling student-built interaction design projects with less expense than with other prototyping systems available at the time. Founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles named the project after Arduin of Ivrea, the main historical character of the town. "Arduino" is also an Italian masculine first name, meaning "brave friend".

The Arduino project is a fork of the open-source Wiring Platform. Colombian artist and programmer Hernando Barragán created Wiring as a master's thesis at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea under the supervision of Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas. Wiring was based on Processing and its integrated development environment which had been created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

Arduino was built around the Wiring project of Hernando Barragan. Wiring was Hernando's thesis project at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. It was intended to be an electronic version of Processing that used our programming environment and was patterned after the Processing syntax. It was supervised by myself and Massimo Banzi, an Arduino founder. I don't think Arduino would exist without Wiring and I don't think Wiring would exist without Processing. And I know Processing would certainly not exist without Design By Numbers and John Maeda.

As of May 2011, more than 300,000 Arduino units were "in the wild". Felipe of baligena.com calls it "the next wave of computing for the 21st century".