Vitamina A: the first Arduino made in Chirale, of course in white livery!

Arduino is undoubtedly one of the technologies that have most characterised the maker movement, to the point of becoming the very icon of electronic technology in the new 4.0 era — even though there is very little that is innovative inside this product. In fact, almost nothing.

Rather than being an innovative technology, Arduino is a revolutionary product. Revolutionary because it has democratised — that is, made accessible to practically everyone — modern digital electronics.

Truly making available to anyone the technology on which most of the products that regulate our lives are based is no small feat.

The famous aphorism by Henry Ford that there is real progress only when the benefits of new technologies are available to everyone is an undeniable truth.

Arduino is a tool that allows anyone to design, in a simple and intuitive way, any interactive electronic product. In our daily activities we are surrounded by objects and devices that work thanks to the presence inside them of a microcontroller. The microcontroller is the brother of the microprocessor: derived from the first chips developed in the 1980s thanks to the technology developed by Italian physicist Federico Faggin, it is present practically everywhere.

It is the electronic brain found in car control units, household appliances, anti-theft devices, home-automation systems, boilers and water heaters, in the car remote control and the gate one. Any electronic product that receives input from sensors — even just from buttons — and performs any action, from turning on a pump to regulating a motor’s speed or controlling a robot, contains at least one microcontroller, and the microcontroller contains a program — software developed by someone.

Until 2005, designing interactive electronic systems and programming microcontrollers was a job for specialised engineers and technicians. Without skills in electronics and computing, it was impossible to build — even on an amateur basis — a microcontroller-based system.

The revolution led by Professor Massimo Banzi and his team at the Ivrea School of Design was to make the design and realisation of microcontroller-based electronic prototypes child’s play — and this is not a figurative image, since using the tinkering method, which is the typical way children play and invent things, anyone can build an interactive electronic device.

With Arduino you build prototypes, not industrial products fit to be put on the market — true — but the realisation of a prototype is the first, most creative step in the design of a new product.

Making electronic-prototyping technology available to artists and creatives was a revolutionary action.

Innovation in the field of electronic interaction was suddenly accelerated. Electronic interaction is everywhere in our world. The Revolution has just begun, but the first effects can already be measured. The cost reduction in digital-manufacturing technologies and the feasibility of Internet of Things architectures are just two examples of phenomena that are the fruit of this revolution.

In our consulting activities we are often witnesses of the change brought about by the Arduino platform and by the consequent methodological paradigm shift imposed in the sector now called Industry 4.0.

Training on Arduino and on the resulting new design and development methods is one of our most market-requested activities.

Arduino, from a technical point of view, is a simple system, easily built by anyone on a prototyping breadboard with a handful of electronic components costing a few euros in total.

The heart of the system is a Microchip/Atmel ATMega 328P microcontroller. The rest of the components only serves to put this chip in the correct operating conditions, ready to power our prototypes.

Our courses are based on the learn by making method: our students learn by creating and building their own prototypes, with the same spirit with which kindergarten-age children discover the world and let their creativity loose by playing with LEGO.

To make Arduino even more accessible, we had fun redesigning the circuit layout in order to obtain an equivalent board, which can easily be built by our students — armed for the occasion with a soldering iron.

It is a way to learn the professional techniques of PCB design, but also to learn to solder — having fun and really entering the heart of this revolutionary product.

The first didactic board designed by us has just been released in beta. It is called Vitamina A.

Why did we choose this name? Because Vitamin A, like many other vitamins, is a chiral molecule.

Chirale was the name of the first blog that aggregated the first and largest Italian maker community. The name was chosen for a play on words that combined the root χέρι (hand in Greek) with science and synthesis technology. A name inspired by the nascent digital craftsmanship. Chirale is the name chosen for our company by the founders of that community, once ambitions and projects had become reality.

Vitamina A is the first of a series of didactic projects, to be followed by boards aimed at the professional market. All the boards will have names of chiral molecules.