At the 10th annual Maker Faire Bay Area event held recently, Massimo Banzi, a co-founder of the Arduino system explained, in a flurry of hand gestures, the way forward for Arduino.

This comes on the back of the announcement in March this year of the fracturing of the original Arduino team and the setup of the Arduino Srl breakaway organization by one of the original team members. Massimo went on to say that they have entered into a strategic partnership with Adafruit who will be building Arduino boards for the US market from a manufacturing facility in Manhattan. Arduino products will be marketed under the Genuino name (not to be confused with the Gertduino) in countries where the Arduino name has already been registered by the breakaway organization.

He went on to describe a new system consisting of series of small boards, each with a built-in microcontroller which could be hooked up to form a more complex system. In the past the microcontroller was often the most expensive component of a system but today they are relatively cheap and small enough to integrate alongside sensors on small boards. When two or more boards are plugged together they automatically recognize one another and the whole system control function is defined or redefined (without breaking out a soldering iron) from the software design environment.

Massimo also said that the wearable Arduino GEMMA received such an enthusiastic response that they sold out within 5 minutes of its release! The (genuine) Arduino ZERO from Massimo’s team is also set for release in early June and the WiFi shield announced last September is targeted for release at the end of June. To find out more visit arduino.cc