Arduino is an open-source project founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis. It builds on the work of many people, projects, and institutions. This page attempts to summarize those contributions.

Arduino was initially developed at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, in northern Italy. It derives from Wiring, a platform built by Hernando Barragan as his master’s thesis at Interaction-Ivrea. Hernando was advised by Massimo and Casey Reas. Wiring and, in turn, Arduino build on previous work by both Massimo and Casey -- Massimo’s Programma2003 electronics prototyping platform and the Processing platform by Casey and Ben Fry. Early versions of both Wiring and Arduino also relied upon Pascal Stang’s avrlib libraries.

The initial Arduino boards were designed by Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles. David Mellis developed the initial Arduino software based on Wiring, with many contributions early on by Nicholas Zambetti. Tom Igoe at ITP in New York was an early adopter and advisor on the Arduino project. Gianluca Martino helped with manufacturing and hardware design.

The Arduino project is now supported by an international company, with offices and people around the world. Arduino takes its name from a bar in Ivrea, which was named after an early king of Italy from Ivrea.

The Arduino development environment is derived from Processing and implemented in Java. Arduino initially targeted AVR microcontrollers from Atmel, making use of open-source software including avr-gcc and avrdude. Many people have contributed to the Arduino software development, as shown on GitHub.

Atmel supported the porting of the Arduino software to ARM-based microcontrollers, including the Cortex M3 on the Arduino DUE and the Cortex M0 on the Arduino ZERO.

Leah Buechley, together with SparkFun Electronics, developed the LilyPad Arduino. The Arduino Fio was developed by Shigeru Kobayashi with SparkFun. SparkFun developed the Arduino Pro and Arduino Pro Mini.

Arduino Micro and Arduino Gemma were developed together with Adafruit Industries. Arduino GSM Shield was developed together with Telefonica I + D. Arduino Robot was developed with Complubot. Arduino Nano was developed with Gravitech. Arduino Materia 101 (a 3D printer) was developed in collaboration with ShareBot.

Intel was our initial partner for the Arduino Certified program. We’ve worked with a variety of partners to develop the Arduino AtHeart products.