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FEATURE

Arduino: The Next Generation

M

assimo Banzi had been the

public face and CEO of Arduino

for as long as there had been

an Arduino, but in November

2017 he stepped down as part

of a partnership with ARM

Holdings that also ended the lawsuit between two

organisations, both called Arduino. Up stepped

Fabio Violante to become the new CEO. We caught

up with Fabio to find out about the new technology,

and how he got started with Arduino.

HackSpace You’re the new company CEO, but

what’s your personal relationship with Arduino?

Fabio Violante It’s a long story! It goes back to the

origin of Arduino. I know Massimo because we

were working together and we were friends in

normal life. When I finished my PhD in Computer

Science at Politecnico di Milano – the main

technical university in Milan – I was doing a PhD

in human-computer interaction, but doing boring

stuff. Human-computer interaction for safety-

critical systems, so, theory and doing a lot of it.

I went to visit the Interaction Design Institute of

Ivrea – a school that was started just six months

before I went to visit them – and they asked me

if I knew someone who could teach electronics to

designers and to ask this question to my colleagues

at the Politecnico.

I went back and they said “No! Teaching

electronics to designers? For us?” Those were

guys working on highly sophisticated FGPAs, so

they didn’t care about designers. I thought about

Massimo – he had a real passion for electronics

and he worked as a CTO for an internet provider

at that point in time. I said, “Massimo, you could

be the right person for this type of engagement –

they’re designers, you love design, and you know

electronics.” I introduced Massimo to the school

and they hired him. That’s how the story started.

When he was teaching at the Design Institute of

Ivrea, they started the Arduino project as a way to

standardise the electronics projects the students

were doing. I introduced Massimo to the school and

they invented Arduino, so I’m sort of the great-

grandfather to some extent.

I was in touch with Massimo occasionally – once

or twice a year as a sort of mentor – but I had my

own company. In 2010 I sold my company to BMC

Software (the eighth largest software enterprise

in the world). I then became CTO of BMC Software

for five years until 2015, but I was commuting from

Italy every other week, so I decided to resign. At

that point Massimo reached out to me and said,

“Now that you have more time, could you help me

with Arduino?”

This was more or less the starting time of the

legal mess between the other party and us, so I

started just advising and then step-by-step I got

more engaged because there was a lot of work to do

• to transform Arduino into a company and solve
  the legal situation and, from there, more and more
  engagement. It became like a 200% occupation of
  my time, and in 2017 we resolved the situation with
  the help of ARM and I became the CEO, and we
  made Massimo focus more on the technology side
  as CTO of the company. It’s a very long story – I
  tried to compress it!

HackSpace It feels like there’s a lot more coming

out of Arduino at the moment.

FV When you don’t have to cope all the time with

lawyers and you have this community ... for me

the innovation was the simplest thing. The more

complex thing was transforming this group of

ultra-smart people into something that can deliver.

There was a change between the past and now. In

the past there was this announcement and like

one year later or two years later [the product came

out]. Now I put a rule in Arduino that, when we

talk about something, we should have this thing

almost ready to ship. All these products that we are

announcing will be available between the end of

June and the beginning of July.

Meet the man in charge

NEW CEO

Above

Fabio Violante

is justifiably

pround of the new

Arduino products