Wiring

= original and mostly unacknowledged prototype of what became Arduino

Discussion

Wiring vs Arduino

Hernando Barragan:

"The Formation of Arduino When IDII manufactured the first set of Wiring boards, the cost was probably around USD$50 each. (I don’t know what the actual cost was, as I wasn’t involved in the process. However, I was selling the boards from Colombia for about USD$60.) This was a considerable drop in price from the boards that were currently available, but it was still a significant cost for most people.

In 2005, Massimo Banzi, along with David Mellis (an IDII student at the time) and David Cuartielles, added support for the cheaper ATmega8 microcontroller to Wiring. Then they forked (or copied) the Wiring source code and started running it as a separate project, called Arduino.

There was no need to create a separate project, as I would have gladly helped them and developed support for the ATmega8 and any other microcontrollers. I had planned to do this all along.

To this day, I do not know exactly why the Arduino Team forked the code from Wiring. It was also puzzling why we didn’t work together. So, to answer the question, I was never asked to become a member of the Arduino Team.

Even though I was perplexed by the Arduino Team forking the code, I continued development on Wiring, and almost all of the improvements that had been made to Wiring, by me and plenty of contributors, were merged into the Arduino source code. I tried to ignore the fact that they were still taking my work and also wondered about the redundancy and waste of resources in duplicating efforts.

By the end of 2005, I started to work with Casey Reas on a chapter for the book “Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Artists and Designers.” The chapter presents a short history of electronics in the Arts. It includes examples for interfacing Processing with Wiring and Arduino. I presented those examples in both platforms and made sure the examples included worked for both Wiring and Arduino.

The book got a second edition in 2013 and the chapter was revised again by Casey and me, and the extension has been made available online since 2014.

...

The reference to Wiring on the Arduino.cc website, although it has improved slightly over time, is misleading as it tries to attribute Wiring to Programma2003.

It is no secret that the acknowledgement of Wiring has been very limited in the past. Back in 2013, at Open Hardware Summit at MIT, during the panel “Implications of Open Source Business: Forking and Attribution”, David Mellis acknowledges, for the first time, that the Arduino Team hadn’t done a very good job acknowledging Wiring. Unfortunately, he didn’t go into details why they hadn’t." (http://arduinohistory.github.io/)

History

Hernando Barragán:

"Why Did You Create Wiring?

I started Wiring in 2003 as my Master’s thesis project at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy.

The objective of the thesis was to make it easy for artists and designers to work with electronics, by abstracting away the often complicated details of electronics so they can focus on their own objectives.

The full thesis document can be downloaded here: http://people.interactionivrea.org/h.barragan/thesis/thesis_low_res.pdf

Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas (known for his work on Processing) were supervisors for my thesis.

The project received plenty of attention at IDII, and was used for several other projects from 2004, up until the closure of the school in 2005.

Because of my thesis, I was proud to graduate with distinction; the only individual at IDII in 2004 to receive the distinction. I continued the development of Wiring while working at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia, where I began teaching as an instructor in Interaction Design.

What Wiring is, and why it was created can be extracted from the abstract section of my thesis document. Please keep in mind that it was 2003, and these premises are not to be taken lightly. You may have heard them before recited as proclamations:

“… Current prototyping tools for electronics and programming are mostly targeted to engineering, robotics and technical audiences. They are hard to learn, and the programming languages are far from useful in contexts outside a specific technology …”

“… It can also be used to teach and learn computer programming and prototyping with electronics…”

“Wiring builds on Processing…”

These were the key resulting elements of Wiring:

Simple integrated development environment (IDE), based on the Processing.org IDE running on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux to create software programs or “sketches”1, with a simple editor.

How Was Wiring Created?

Through the thesis document, it is possible to understand the design process I followed. Considerable research and references to prior work has served as a basis for my work. To quickly illustrate the process, a few key points are provided below.

Have you ever wondered where those commands come from?

Probably one of the most distinctive things, that is widely known and used today by Arduino users in their sketches, is the set of commands I created as the language definition for Wiring.

Abstracting the microcontroller pins as numbers was, without a doubt, a major decision, possible because the syntax was defined prior to implementation in any hardware platform. All the language command naming and syntax were the result of an exhaustive design process I conducted, which included user testing with students, observation, analysis, adjustment and iteration.

As I developed the hardware prototypes, the language also naturally developed. It wasn’t until after the final prototype had been made that the language became solid and refined.

If you are still curious about the design process, it is detailed in the thesis document, including earlier stages of command naming and syntax that were later discarded." (http://arduinohistory.github.io/)

More Information

• much more detailed history at http://arduinohistory.github.io/