<i>2) Apple will start to abandon their restrictive “Made for iPod”(TM) program and adopt the Arduino in some way for accessory development</i><p>Phil's a cool, intelligent guy, but this statement pegs my meter somewhere between "excessive optimism" and "ridiculous Apple fanboyism".<p>Apple, the infamous UX control freak, will give up the control (and revenue) associated with the MFi program in favor of allowing their users to customize their experience? What's next, Windows 8 will run an OpenBSD kernel?<p>Sorry, perhaps that last was excessively sarcastic, but let's be realistic here: one of Apple's fundamental properties is its fanatical control over every aspect of the way that users interface with the device, directly or indirectly. They will <i>never</i> give this up.<p>MS/NOK (funny how, at least in my mental model, they're one entity in the phone market now) and (especially) HP/Palm should be looking at this and thinking about doing the same. RIM probably doesn't care because their userbase doesn't.
It's a seriously exciting time to be a developer. Or to be alive in general, really.<p>Growing up in the shadow of our failure to colonize space, it was easy to imagine that history had basically stalled and there wasn't much left to hope for except an uneventful decline. Added to that, all our interesting problems were too big for an individual to hope to solve.<p>Instead, the ability for individuals to meaningfully innovate has jumped to levels that haven't been seen since the industrial revolution, or the renaissance. I always envied the 19th Century inventors who created bleeding edge tech without requiring teams of a thousand engineers. I don't think I need to be envious anymore. The coming decades will be just as important.
Fascinating as Mr. Spock would say.<p>I got goaded into teaching a class on Robotics at Google, it was well attended and the first thing we did was build FreeDuino's from Solarbotics. When coming up with a curriculum I chose the Arduino because it's development environment ran on MacOS and Linux (every engineer at Google had either a MacOS or Linux laptop, no Windows) and its use of C++ lite type models was a good match for the codebase they worked in on a day to day basis.<p>I designed (but sadly never got into production) a 'super sheild' which, if you installed the connectors in the Freeduino 'upside down' (relative to the instructions) you could plug it onto the robot shield thing which had 6 AA size batteries, a couple of motor controller chips, mounts for the GM8 (Solarbotics again) wheels with wheel encoders. And a bunch of bits for sensor logic.<p>That being said I certainly can't take credit for Google picking the platform as some of the folks were already familar with it but still its nice to see that this effort has lived on as it were.
I'm 100% delighted that Google chose to standardize on the Arduino platform, but I fear it means we'll now be stuck with the infuriating 0.160" header spacing between shield pins forever.<p>Background: <a href="http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2009/07/arduino-offset-header/" rel="nofollow">http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2009/07/arduino-offset-heade...</a><p>Here's the explanation of how the bad spacing happened from Massimo Banzi: <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1212632541" rel="nofollow">http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1212632541</a> (scroll down 10-15 posts)<p>"We had 5 minutes before the deadline to go into production, the PCB guy was on the phone saying 'send it now or it goes to next week' and we didn't have a name yet... they I said let's call it Arduino like a bar we used to go...there wasn't much time to think."
If anyone's interested, I got their firmware to run on stock Arduino hardware (which costs $55 instead of $390).<p><a href="http://romfont.com/2011/05/12/google%E2%80%99s-open-accessory-development-kit-on-standard-arduino-hardware/" rel="nofollow">http://romfont.com/2011/05/12/google%E2%80%99s-open-accessor...</a><p>It's looking good so far. Now all I need is a device that supports accessory mode ...
If anyone is interested in teaching arduino to the next generation, I'm developing an open graphical programming platform for arduino that is aimed at kids. <a href="http://kck.st/mnWW8y" rel="nofollow">http://kck.st/mnWW8y</a>