In today’s increasingly impatient world
We do not blindly follow, do not close ourselves off, and do not judge maliciously
Expanding horizons with TED
How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination
TED Introduction:In 2013, Massimo Banzi and others invented Arduino, a small and easy-to-use open-source microcontroller. This has enabled thousands of people around the world to create a variety of personalized items—from toys to satellite devices. Because, as he said: “You don’t need anyone’s permission to do great things.”
Speaker:Massimo Banzi, Arduino
Duration:15:43
(To watch the pure English video, please click the original text)
Chinese Translation of the Speech Script
Too many words cannot fit, please click to read the original English speech script
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave a toy car to his 8-year-old son. Normally, we would buy such gifts at the mall, but he did not. Instead, he downloaded a file from a website and printed the toy car using this printer. The idea of creating things with electronic devices is referred to by The Economist as the third industrial revolution.
But I believe we are currently experiencing another revolution, one involving open-source hardware and the maker movement, because the printer my friend used is actually open-source. Anyone can go to this website to download various files needed to make this printer: construction documents, hardware, software, and various assistance can all be found online. This is a large online community where thousands of people from around the world gather to create printers like this. Innovations are happening all the time because everything is open-source. You don’t need anyone’s permission to create great things. The emergence of this market is like the emergence of personal computers in 1976, where Apple and other computer companies competed, and a few years later, we will also see the emergence of an Apple in this market.
Interestingly, as I said, all electronic components are open-source. The key component of this machine is the Arduino board, which is the core part of the printer. This is a project I have been working on for seven years; it is an open-source project that I collaborated on with these friends, a total of five people: two Americans, two Italians, and one Spaniard (also referring to a plant). This is indeed a global project. We all work at the Ivrea Interaction Design Institute in Italy, which studies how to design simple shapes that can interact with people. It is meaningful to create devices that can interact with people. If we only made a foam model of a phone, it would be meaningless. What we create must interact with people to be meaningful. Therefore, we developed Arduino and other projects to provide our students with a simple platform that makes it easy for them to use and gives them the opportunity to create practical things. However, they do not have five years to become electronic engineers; we only have one month.