 So, yes, my name is Pasco Banzi, I'm one of the co-founders of Alcovino. And so Alcovino was born as part of an effort to sort of enable anybody to innovate by making technology, complex technology simple to use. So this is kind of a, now originally, statement, it applies to a bunch of technologies, because I was teaching in design school in the north-west of Italy. And the objective was to really understand how we design the interaction between people and technology. And the way we design this kind of interaction between things and technology changes the experience that people have and make them able to have a very good experience or really good experience, to be very innovative, very creative, or be very frustrated and unhappy. So at Ivrea, there was this project called Processing that was coming from the MIT, which was essentially designed to make it simple for artists to program and be very creative with code. So there were a number of projects that we worked on there, and so Alcovino's got the summary of all of the work that we did there. But also the idea was we realized, and this is the first kind of connection with Linux, that when you have this big open source community and work together, if you then make your work open source, you automatically multiply the effect of the work that you do. You make something become able to expand really fast. So the little Alcovino board here, which is the physical manifestation of Alcovino, it's essentially, as I said, it's also the first popular open source hardware project. So there was a bunch of people trying to do open source hardware, but then Alcovino is the most popular one. So we tried to apply the idea of doing open source software also to hardware. And it's also one of the factors that enabled Alcovino to become very popular. And so our work is made of building firmware, software, content, hardware, development environment, and then just making an open source so that people can build upon that technology. And the technology is simple enough that even kids learn how to build things with Alcovino. And so we enable a bunch of people to use software and hardware as a creative tool to invent, to transform their ideas into something tangible that works. And so in the history of Alcovino we crossed this, somebody calls it movement. So this group of people trying to, you know, again be creative with technology called makers. And we became one of the technologies that enabled this group of people to do a missing thing. So I mean with people with Alcovino buildings like, you know, this is a glove that interprets sign language and helps people who cannot speak through sign language and interface, with this glove interface to a mobile phone that speaks what they sign. You know, people also make self-time lasers or people even make self-driving luggage. So this is a self-driving piece of language that follows you around based on the Bluetooth idea of your phone. People build distilleries, open source distilleries. So this is an open source device that you can do to make your own Alcovino, like, you know, your own moonshine. But also people use a lot to, as an artistic tool, so this is a, it's an interface to produce music based on the ways of touch this skirt. And also Alcovino ended up in more sort of common things like 3D printers, a lot of the open source 3D printers at least at the beginning, they either used Alcovino as their sort of mainboard or they used it as a, the software aspect of Alcovino became sort of part of the device. Also Drone used that. So how does Alcovino and Linux cross? It starts off with the fact that I used Alcovino and Linux for a long time. This is my Linux counter badge, which says I registered in 1998, but I did install it the first time in 1993 and it was a very rewarding and yet very painful experience of downloading 70 floppy disks from the internet and just, you know, doing that. But luckily there was a guy who installed Xelix with us, so he helped us and we made it happen. But I think, apart from the jobs, with the founders of Alcovino, especially me and the guy I'm strangling, which is his name is David Quartieres, the two of us used Linux a lot in our previous life, in our career. We were very driven by the idea that open source can really help to change the world a little bit. And we felt that the work that we did had to be open source, so we took a bunch of stuff that maybe we worked at the Institute. There was an open source and we made it open source and also we tried to extend that concept to hardware because we saw how the Linux community was very successful and we wanted to try to replicate that into a different field where also hardware is involved. So, in fact, at the beginning there were not something as effective as the GPL license for hardware, so we used Creative Commons. So hardware became, you know, a little bit like poetry or music, you know, so it was an interesting concept. At Alcovino right now, we use Linux a lot. Most of our developers use Linux, also the people who design the hardware, all of the machines that test the products that come out of the factory are based on embedded Linux, our web infrastructure, a number of our products. We worked a few years ago on the first attempt at mixing Alcovino and Linux so bringing together the technology behind the Bigelbor and the microcontroller so that we could experiment on different ways of programming these devices where you can, in a way, distribute the computing between the Linux machine and the microcontroller. We have this other product which is more widespread. It's called the Alcovino YUN, and it has a tiny Linux machine embedded inside the shape of a classic Arduino. And again, this is what we would consider some kind of an edge device, but incredibly simple and incredibly small. And Alcovino right now is a fairly popular platform. We have 150 million sessions on the Arduino.cc website. We have half a million registered people on the platform and we have about 12 million downloads of our development environment every year. And we have this online platform I will talk to you about a little bit later called CREATE which has 400,000 users. And we have this yearly event called Arduino Day where people can get together on a Saturday to celebrate Arduino as an open source project which last year had 500 events all over the world which were completely organized by the community. And it was very interesting to see this happening because we just say, you know, hello people, Arduino Day is on this day and then 500 group of people are on a roll that just set up an event. And we put them on an app and it's just amazing to see. So with the work that we did so far we enabled a ton of people to use this technology as a creative tool. And it's used by people who teach technology, by people who build prototypes it's used by big companies to prototype ideas it's used for building even prototypes or even products started off as a ton of products you choose to start off as an Arduino prototype. And so that was very interesting to see. And then this all, you know, IoT revolution happened and then we realized that the complexity goes up there's even more factors to keep in mind. So how do we, we start to figure out how do we make it simpler for people to also be a connected product? Because again Arduino is very much a bottom-up type project a lot of people use it sometimes even at work actually a lot, they use it at work but it never comes from the official channels it's gonna happen because people use it and it's useful to them and again that reminded me a little bit about Linux at the beginning people started to use it because they loved it because it was making their life simple and I used to be the webmaster of like the biggest at the time, the Internet provider in Italy and we were paid by Microsoft to have the main web server on Windows NT so we ended up recombining Apache to pretend to be Internet information server so that people still use Linux as the main web server and still be sponsored by Microsoft. I think if that's, enough years have passed that it's not a crime anymore. It's not a fucking crime anymore. But again, you know, it was so useful that it just grew from the bottom and again that's something that I learned to help people and make their life simpler with simple tools so in IoT we have this challenge this is a slide that every year people at Smart Capital put together a lot of different brands involved in IoT it's insanely big, we are somewhere down there in the corner next to them but a lot of these IoT platforms that people are building right now they're actually quite complicated for everyday people and you need to be an extra pro of different disciplines in order to have one light turn on and now we fix this in a lot of different ways the way we are trying to help fix this thing is based on working on the user experience making things simple to use in the end there's no incredibly advanced technology in the world it's just a way to redefine the way you use certain technology and make it simple for people to understand simplifying some things, moving some complexity over to the software the second thing is for sure open source I think one of the things that was very good for the winner is that since it was open source a lot of people feel that it was not locked in so they used it everywhere and also edge computing we like the idea that you can run your own computing next where the action happens and you don't always have to use big cloud the way you don't know where the data goes so in a way we like this combination so apart from the design aspect for us it's very important because we realize that people ignore whatever design that ignores people this is a quote from an American designer but you have to understand a lot of very interesting projects very powerful piece of technology I ignore it by people because they're complicated to use and at the end of the day you'll never heard about somebody taking a class on how to learn how to use Facebook and that's the problem with a lot of piece of technology that you work every day since they're designed for professional users there is this idea that you need to suffer that it needs to be a bit easier to use because you're a professional, why? so we need to make these tools simple to use we need to remove friction so friction is what happens when people are interacting with the digital interface of any product and basically what they're trying to achieve is made complicated because they have to apply more energy than it would be needed obviously we are a big supporter of open source interoperable system, I'm not going to talk about that because people are much more qualified about that from our way we try to build small open source devices like these ones, these are little sensor nodes that support all the different network protocols they're low power, simple to program and you can sort of build your edge-edge-edge sort of nodes with this and we also build this cloud platform that we think it's going to simplify a lot the way people work so we put essentially the real development environment in the cloud so you need just a browser and you can program we also started to capture more of the project not just the code, but also the hardware inside the Arduino sort of project that you pick we support a ton of architecture so now we support probably about 15 different types of processors so you can just write code without moving around different platforms quite easily we have over 4,000 libraries that support all sorts of sensors and actuators and protocols so if you want to build something you just open this you type the name or the protocol or the sensor, click you're done we also build this tool which is based on the Hackstop platform but it's integrated into Create where people can actually describe all projects and you can actually find pre-made solutions like RFID attendance system or pool controllers all sorts of different applications and you can click on a button and the code for this application will end up in your project on the cloud and you can build it very easily there are some examples that we made we also have a simple and the moment is very simple it's just an experiment of something very simple that allows you to connect the device to the cloud and manage it it's evolving into something much much bigger which will make it easy for people to build IoT applications so our objective is that we'll never be able to build a complex application ever but to enable a ton of people to build like the most common use cases very very easily and a lot of these people this will be open source but we're adding a couple of new things that I've talked about here for the first time so we realized that in order to go forward we had to go back a little bit so we built this thing which is a small you don't see very well because the text is very small so we built the equivalent of the Arduino IDE Development Environment has a common line so you can now say things like Arduino, new and it creates a new project Arduino installs a library Google installs a library so you can now use whatever development environment you like and you can use a bunch of common line tools to automate all of this and it's fully integrated in the things I told you before and so here is just showing an example of somebody creating a project connecting to a board compiling and uploading the code to the board through the common line so basically now our classic desktop IDE, the cloud IDE and this thing are sharing the same code so you can basically embed Arduino as an engine inside a project and you can take code, compile it just by calling this this thing and we also have ways that you can connect this to the Arduino website so that you can you can basically use the Arduino website as a way to share and store your code in the cloud but one thing that I think it's very interesting that we are working on is that there's a bunch of these little single board computers that people use but we felt that a lot of the Arduino users they find the classic way of dealing with Linux and installing the operating system quite complicated that stops them from using this effectively so we worked with a sponsorship from Intel and we basically made Arduino able to generate Linux program so you can take your Arduino code and I'm going to show you quickly a super fast Arduino if you can see so the idea is that starting from now the thing should be online as in like in 2 minutes from now you'll be able to go get a Raspberry Pi for example and just connect it to this thing and you just type the p address of your Raspberry Pi and you press a button the Arduino V8 will connect to the Raspberry Pi install a bunch of software on it and connect it to the Arduino cloud like it's doing right now so you literally write the address and use the name of the password and the whole thing will automatically happen for you then you give a name to your device and then you have this thing called myDevices where you see all your devices there and then you can take a piece of code a piece of code that you're running on a classic Arduino board and you can say okay I want to compile it for the Raspberry Pi so it will take that Arduino code and then compile it turn it into a Linux application and over the internet installing on your device anywhere it is so if you see the code it's controlling some funky LEDs so the idea is there's a ton of people that know how to use Arduino and they can take their knowledge and apply to this and once you have these devices attached to your Arduino cloud you can then manage them remotely so here's a control panel where you can set a few parameters monitor how your device is working you can configure the network you can even run multiple Arduino programs in parallel and you can even do things if you're on an Intel platform you can even do computer vision inside Arduino which is an interesting concept, it's really cool so you can just use OpenCD and Arduino in the same code running on Linux and you can also install software packages you can manage your packages you can manage your repositories where you get the packages from so in a way this and again you can take your code, compile it and deploy it so the idea is this is going to make it's going to make it very easy for people to use devices like Raspberry Pi Eaglebone and a bunch of Intel based single board computers too it's going to become very easy to use and very easy to program at the edge clearly the software that we developed is either already open source or it's becoming open source like more so you can also use it for whatever project you're building because our idea is to try to create an experience where you learn one step at a time you build up your knowledge one step at a time a lot of people find themselves in front of tasks that look like a wall that you have to clean climb with your bare hands and it's too complicated so the idea was I don't we break that down into like steps that take people there one step at a time and we've seen it with what we've done with Arduino until now that if you do this process you enable really a ton of people to do amazing stuff and you know and then later on they learn and they deepen their knowledge and they become maybe they study more and they become professionals but we enabled a ton of people that before they never thought that they could do embedded programming and now they're doing and they're contributing to the community so if you want to try it out go to create an Arduino.cc and check it out it's going to be each of you online now if you have comments you want to work with us you want to build a project with us send me an email and thank you very much