Arduino and Freeduino

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Arduino and Freeduino are open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. For examples of applications please check here and here.


Contents


Arduino

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software on running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).

The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the open source software is freely available. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.

Freeduino

Freeduino is Arduino-compatible

Freeduino began as a collaborative project to publish open-source Arduino-compatible production files. The files that resulted from this project allow users to create boards that are 100% functionally, electrically and physically compatible with Arduino hardware. Over time, Freeduino has come to mean hardware that is "Arduino-compatible".[1]

Freeduino is Trademark-free

Arduino is the name of the official Arduino microcontroller project, hosted at arduino.cc. Although "Arduino" is not offically registered (trademark registration was refused in the US in June 2009, based on the fact that Arduino is "primarily merely a surname"), it is generally respected by the Arduino/Freeduino community as the property of the Arduino team. This means using the Arduino name on your products is a community no-no.[2]

Freeduino, on the other hand, comes with a free and unrestricted license to use the Freeduino name, for any use. Branding products as Freeduino instead allows users to build on the established knowledge and open-source licenses of the Arduino project without having to worry about the slim possibility of trademark infringement. This means that you can take the files you find, make products, brand them as Freeduino and do whatever you want with them without asking. While definitive policies for open-source hardware have not yet been developed, this 'freedom of use' policy is similar to the Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition.[3]

Freeduino is an experiment in decentralized hardware design.

Freeduino is a free-form version of the Arduino, in that is not developed under a centralized design process. There is no Freeduino team, or anyone to ask permission of: anyone, anywhere, can design and produce a Freeduino product, no questions asked, no royalties paid. It's sort of like electronic hardware anarchy- or democracy, depending on how you look at it. We derived the Freeduino files from Arduino for exactly this reason: to see what the Arduino project would have looked like if it had open hardware distribution and manufacturing.[4]


Examples of application

(please add more)

Energy monitoring


Interesting designs


References

  1. ↑ http://www.freeduino.org/about.html
  2. ↑ http://www.freeduino.org/about.html
  3. ↑ http://www.freeduino.org/about.html
  4. ↑ http://www.freeduino.org/about.html


External links

See also

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