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"The open-source Arduino micro-controller is a very useful piece of kit which has been implemented by hackers to power countless endeavors from Musical Umbrellas to Angry Birds Slingshot Controllers. For some projects however, the flexibility of the Arduino can be overkill and it's this issue which prompted Digispark to create a simpler, cheaper alternative - a tiny Arduino-compatible developmental circuit board that costs as little as US$12."

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. It started off as a project to give artists access to embedded micro-processors for interaction design projects, but I think it's going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap, prototyping for embedded systems. It turns what used to be fairly tough hardware problems into simpler software problems.

"Arduino is probably the world's most popular open source physical computing platform. The little microcontrollers show up in everything from wild art projects to serious home automation efforts. It's great and all, but couldn't it be … smaller? Electrical engineer Ken Burns thought so, and got to work on the TinyDuino."

The Internet of Things should be its own category on Kickstarter, since there's yet another project on the site that hopes to connect your physical and digital worlds. But its real promise may be in providing context to computers that will evolve into new user interfaces. Guess what! There's another Kickstarter project that pushes the Internet of Things forward in a fun way. For as little as $10 you could pledge money to SmartThings, which wants to develop sensors and an application environment that lets people who may not be comfortable programming an Arduino board tie the physical world to their virtual one.

Les signaux s'accumulent. L'industrie « traditionnelle » serait de plus en plus tentée par l'open source. C'était déjà le cas dans l'électronique, avec notamment la carte Arduino. La santé et l'automobile y trouveraient aussi aujourd'hui un relais d'innovation crédible, voir incontournable. Un article de The Economist intitulé « When code can kill or cure » (dans le cahier spécial technologie du N° du 2 juin 2012) explique qu'utiliser un modèle « open source » à la conception des équipements médicaux promet d'accroître la sécurité et l'innovation. Basés aujourd'hui sur des systèmes ultra-propriétaires, les équipements médicaux, défibrillateurs, pompes à insulines sont parfois soumis à des défaillances bien plus graves qu'un simple plantage d'ordinateur. Sans parler des tentations des hackers de prouver la vulnérabilité de ces systèmes au piratage.

The "maker" movement owes much to O'Reilly's Make magazine, which is like Popular Mechanics for a new generation of Arduino-enabled, LED-lit, UAV-launching DIY types. It's a monthly magazine packed with hobbyist projects: Everything from making your own homemade cigar box guitar to building a laser CNC router for fabricating stuff. With last week's day-long workshop, O'Reilly was making the case (pardon the pun) that making can be a business, too.