Preface

My Arduino journey started after watching Elise Huard present her talk, “The internet of things,” at Rails Underground in the summer of 2009. Following the conference, I immediately purchased a copy of Massimo Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino (O’Reilly, 2008), which I read from cover to cover on the train back to where I was staying.

Shortly afterwards, I purchased my first Arduino and started playing, experimenting, and building small projects. My first major project was an obstacle-avoidance robot, which I presented at the 2010 Scottish Ruby conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.

I’ve had a lifelong interest in underwater vehicles and the marine environment, and following the conference I started work on an Arduino-controlled underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV), which I duly presented at the 2011 Scottish Ruby conference.

Since then, I’ve toured the UK and Ireland displaying my ROV at a number of Maker Faires, where it has generated much interested and discussion.

I’m one of the founding members of Aberduino, a hack space based in Aberdeen, Scotland, where we produce installations for various events.

Other Arduino-based projects I’ve worked on include the development of a medical training aid and helping with the Wikispeed project, an open source car.

I continue to work with underwater vehicles and am actively developing a new Arduino-based underwater ROV that can be distributed as a kit.

MARTIN EVANS

I first started working with microcontrollers with the same introduction that a lot of artists and designers had ten years ago: PIC controllers. I found them difficult to understand, finicky, slow to build with, and yet they were the only option. Later I discovered Teleo controllers and then Wiring boards, but when the Arduino arrived in my world, I was hooked.

I’ve used Arduinos for everything from prototyping smart spray-paint cans to building interactive exhibits for museums to creating tools for science experiments. I’m in love with the boards, the environment, and, most especially, the community that has grown up around the Arduino and that’s so willing to teach, experiment, explore, and share.

JOSHUA NOBLE

My interest in music technology led me to discover the Arduino as a platform for rapid development and physical computing sometime around 2008. I was originally introduced to the Arduino as a tool for designing musical interfaces for live performance. This led to the Arduinome project, an open source port of the popular Monome USB MIDI controller, which I worked on with longtime collaborator Owen Vallis. The success of the Arduinome project was a true testament to the uniqueness of the Arduino itself—a device that empowers musicians and artists of all technical backgrounds to create unique and powerful tools for expression. Around the same time, I was taking a course in musical robotics and kinetic sculpture, and we used the Arduino to drive a collaborative musical robotic instrument.

Since then, the Arduino has been at the heart of my work. In 2009 I began pursuing my PhD, which investigated the affordances of multimodal sensor systems for musical performance and pedagogy. Using the Arduino, I’ve built numerous interfaces and hyperinstruments for capturing data and metrics from musical performance. I built the SmartFiducial, which added z-depth (in-air proximity) and pressure sensing to tangible tabletop surfaces. Embedding multimodal sensing systems within instruments or placing them on human performers, I’ve investigated a wide variety of machine learning tasks, such as performer recognition and drum-hand recognition. I completed my PhD and became a professor in Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence, and Design at California Institute of the Arts in 2012, and the Arduino continues to be an important part of my artistic and academic practice. My work with the Arduino has been featured online and in print, including in WIRED and Computer Arts magazine, and my current Arduino-based projects range from kinetic surfaces for live projection mapping and visuals to wireless sensing systems for interactive dance performance.

JORDAN HOCHENBAUM