Who owns Arduino? We don’t mean metaphorically — we’d say that’s the community of users and developers who’ve all contributed to this amazing hardware/software ecosystem. We mean literally. Whose chips are on the table? Whose money talks? It looks like ARM could have a stake!

The Arduino vs Arduino saga “ended” just under a year ago with an out-of-court settlement that created a private holding company part-owned by both parties in the prior dispute over the trademark. And then, [Banzi] and the original founders bought out [Musto]’s shares and took over. That much is known fact.

The murky thing about privately held companies and out-of-court settlements is that all of the details remain private, so we can only guess from outside. We can speculate, however, that buying out half of the Arduino AG wasn’t cheap, and that even pooling all of their resources together, the original founders just didn’t have the scratch to buy [Musto] out. Or as the Arduino website puts it, “In order to make [t]his a reality, we needed a partner that would provide us with the resources to regain full ownership of Arduino as a company… and Arm graciously agreed to support us to complete the operation.” That, and the rest of the Arduino blog post, sure looks like ARM provided some funds to buy back Arduino.

We frankly can’t make sense of these conflicting statements, at least regarding whether ARM did or didn’t contribute monetary resources to the deal. ARM has no press release on the deal as we write this.

Announcing a partnership without details isn’t a new activity for Arduino. Recently we wrote about open questions on the Arduino Foundation. [Banzi] was willing to speak with Hackaday at length about that topic, suggesting more details were just weeks away but we have yet to see follow-through on that.

What we can tell is that [Banzi] and Arduino want us to know that they’re still independent.

Anyway, the various ARM chips are nice to work with from a hacker perspective. If the AVR-based UNO was the last non-ARM Arduino board ever made, we’d only shed a tiny little tear.

Last week Arduino AG, the holding company for the open source Arduino project, announced that CEO Federico Musto stepped down, to be replaced with Massimo Banzi as new Chairman and CTO of Arduino and Dr. Fabio Violante as CEO.

The move comes after the maker community found troubling discrepancies in Musto’s educational claims.

The maker community vocally complained about former CEO Musto’s claims to be an NYU and MIT graduate and worried about the future of the open source project.

Federico Musto, who until two days ago owned the largest part of Arduino AG has been bought out, having today been replaced by a combination of Massimo Banzi and Fabio Violante.

This should bring to a close the saga that began with a fork where two companies called themselves “Arduino” and bizarrely continued for almost a year after the reconciliation of the two was announced. What remains today is one corporation called Arduino AG, now captained by Massimo Banzi as Chairman and CTO, and Fabio Violante as CEO.

Massimo Banzi was one of the original founders of Arduino and one side of the trademark litigation during the period in which there were two companies. With the buyout of Musto, Banzi moves back to the top spot. This change in leadership occurred as a company called BCMI bought all shares of Arduino AG. BCMI was started by four of the original Arduino co-founders; you could say the old gang rides again.

A new era for Arduino begins today
https://blog.arduino.cc/2017/07/28/a-new-era-for-arduino-begins-today/

Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, co-founders of Arduino, have announced that their company, BCMI, has acquired 100% ownership of Arduino AG — the corporation which owns all of the Arduino trademarks.

Arduino Team — July 28th, 2017
BCMI, the company founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, co-founders of Arduino, announces that today it has acquired 100% ownership of Arduino AG, the corporation which owns all of the Arduino trademarks.

Following the acquisition, Mr. Massimo Banzi becomes the new Chairman and CTO of Arduino. Dr. Fabio Violante will be appointed as the new CEO, replacing Mr. Federico Musto who will pursue other opportunities outside Arduino AG.

The Arduino Wars officially ended last October, and the new Arduino-manufacturing company was registered in January 2017. At the time, we were promised an Arduino Foundation that would care for the open-source IDE and code infrastructure in an open and community-serving manner, but we don’t have one yet. Is it conspiracy? Or foul play? Our advice: don’t fret. These things take time.

But on the other hand, the Arduino community wants to know what’s going on, and there’s apparently some real confusion out there about the state of play in Arduino-land, so we interviewed the principals, Massimo Banzi and Federico Musto, and asked them for a progress report.

The short version is that there are still two “Arduinos”: Arduino AG, a for-profit corporation, and the soon-to-be Arduino Foundation, a non-profit in charge of guiding and funding software and IDE development. The former was incorporated in January 2017, and the latter is still in progress but looks likely to incorporate before the summer is over.

It’s far too early to tell just how independent the Foundation is going to be, or should be, of the company that sells the boards under the same name. Setting up the Foundation correctly is extremely important for the future of Arduino, and Banzi said to us in an interview that he wouldn’t take on the job of president unless it is done right. What the Arduino community doesn’t need right now is a Foundation fork.

One of the big stories of last year was the fracture of the official Arduino supply into two competing organisations at daggers drawn, each headed by a different faction with its origins in the team that gave us the popular single board computers. Since then we’ve had Arduinos from Arduino LLC (the [Massimo] Arduino.cc, arguably the ‘original’, and Arduino trademark holder in the United States) and Arduino SRL (the [Musto] Arduino.org, and owner of the Arduino trademark everywhere except the US) , two websites, two forks of the IDE, and “real” Arduino boards available under a couple of names depending on where in the world you live due to a flurry of legal manoeuvres. Yes. it’s confusing.

Today came news of a supplier throwing its hands up in despair at the demands imposed on them as part of this debacle. Pimoroni, famous as supplier of Raspberry Pi goodies, has put up a blog post explaining why they will henceforth no longer be selling Arduinos.

Why we won’t be selling Genuino or Arduino any more
http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-arduino-any-more/

It started with a split

After the split of Arduino and Arduino (brief explanation here) we sided with the camp that has setup shop as Ardunio LLC in America and rebranded to Genuino in the EU.

We believed (and we still do) that they are the true heart of Arduino and we wanted to support them.

In fact we were very eager to support them!

Ten months to make first contact

After some to-ing and fro-ing to get the “confidential” reseller price list (*sigh* do we still do that?) we finally managed to place an order on January 5th 2016 – almost a full year after our first attempts to make contact.

Wait a minute… we can’t sell Genuino branded boards into the US? What the heck

They know how the internet works right? That it is possible for someone to order a product from *gasp* another country and indeed for that very product to be physically delivered across country borders with almost no hassle!

“Unfortunately, we cannot grant the authorisation to sell Genuino within the US, as we want to keep the 2 brands separated. So if you are already doing it I will have to ask you to stop Genuino sales towards the US immediately.”

“However, I can introduce you to our representative in the US, if you wish to purchase some Arduino boards for the US market.”

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.

EU resellers have already taken the hit of shifting to an unknown brand (Genuino) which has no marketing value to support you and this is how you repay them?

In closing…

It’s a real shame that Arduino LLC seem to have lost any of the Maker-vibe it had.

Here are some tips:

Don’t make resellers stock twice as many SKUs for no reason. It hurts their ability to stock your product which is dumb.
Everyone sells worldwide now. This agreement affects pretty much all of your resellers. They should be angry (I know we are).
Adding confusion to the buying process for customers is just stupid. This is basically the number one golden rule in sales.
We kicked back on the terms. But how many of your non-US resellers are just ignoring the rule? Hint: lots of them.
It’s bad enough we have to deal with an unknown brand in Genuino. But we will, to support you. Just don’t make it worse.
No one else cares about this. Not resellers, customers, or existing users. Only you. It might be worth thinking about that.

So there it is. Once our stock of Genuino boards runs out then they’re gone.

Luckily there are heaps of great Arduino-compatible alternatives

Federico spoke a little bit about the conflict between the two Arduinos, and said that it was brewing inside the company long before he got there. And it does appear that both companies calling themselves Arduino are trying to outdo each other with new boards and new initiatives, and going in different directions. If there is a bright side, it’s that this competition may end up building us better hardware than a single company would, because both are making bets on what will put them out ahead of the game.

Source: http://hackaday.com/2016/05/27/federico-musto-of-arduino-srl-shows-new-arm-based-arduino-boards/

The new boards are called Arduino Primo, Arduino Core, Arduino Alicepad, and Arduino Otto.

The first up is the Primo, a board built to adhere to the UNO form factor. This one is packing an interesting punch. The main micro is not an Atmel chip, but a Nordic nRF52832 ARM Cortex-M4F chip. Besides being a significantly fast CPU with floating-point support, the Nordic IC also has built-in Bluetooth LE and NFC capabilities, and the board has a PCB antenna built in.

On an UNO this is where the silicon would end. But on the Primo you get two more controllers: an ESP8266 and an STM32F103. The former is obvious, it brings WiFi to the party (including over-the-air programming). The STM32 chip is there to provide peripheral control and debugging. Debugging is an interesting development and is hard to come by in the Arduino-sphere. This will use the OpenOCD standard, with platformio.org as the recommended GUI.

The same nRF52 microcontroller is present on the Arduino Core and the Alicepad, which are targeted at wearable electronics. The circular form factor of the Alicepad mimics the familiar sewable form of the Lilypad

Arduino’s other offerings are where the horsepower really gets crazy. The Otto board boasts a gigantic STM32F469: a 169-pin ARM Cortex-M4F clocked at 180 MHz.

PlatformIO is an open source ecosystem for IoT development
Cross-platform build system. Continuous and IDE integration. Arduino and ARM mbed compatible
http://platformio.org/