What is it?

Arduino first of all is open hardware. What does this mean? It means that if you want you can build it by your own.
On the Arduino website you can find diagrams, technical specs and schemes that describe how to build your own handcrafted Arduino board.

It is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

It's a multipurpose card board, so you can use it for multiple applications.

Those examples are simply fantastic, right?
Well we started from scratch, getting to know and learning how the Arduino platform works and we went from zero to some results.

Here's a termometer sensor we built up.

It basically senses the external temperature and compares it to three threshold.
When a threshold is reached it lights a led of a certain color.
And this is just the beginning!

So we can measure temperature, right? Now let's try to do something more complex.
Like, say... A robot!

This robotic beauty, pretty rough though, when it's switched on, will follow you, going straight and if it senses an obstacle it'll try to avoid it.

A couple of exciting examples build up by a small team, in two days...

Imagine the possibilities.
While we were having this fun, we had a very interesting guest in the room.

A woman surrounded by switch, electrical wires, tools, and fashion accessories like bags, pochettes and so on.
All of them, I swear, all of them were electrically powered in some way. From the iPod speakers bag, to the wifi finder purse.
Her project, switch craft, hosted by the astonishing Science Fair in the Festival is fantastic.
She believes that convincing girls to become confident with technology can be easy.

And she proves this through beautiful and useful ready-to-wear accessories.
Providing instructions to build them up, and prototyping some of them for mass production.

This is simply great.
And even bigger and more interesting is the connection with the Arduino team.

We want more!
Now it's OUR turn. What's your next arduino trick?