Get Ready for Arduino Day With These Awesome Meetups and Projects

Arduino Day 2016 is here! This annual event is being celebrated at locations all over the world, as well as online by tweeting projects with the hashtag #MakeArduino. We’ll be at the official event in Berkeley California, and streaming via periscope!

Arduino has become the hardware that is so closely associated with the Maker Movement, that it is sometimes a joke. People will ask in jest, “where’s the Arduino?” on projects where one has no right to exist. There’s a reason for this. It isn’t because the hardware itself is so amazing that every project needs one. The reason that Arduino is such a common name is because of their open and sharing community. If you’re a beginner, you’re welcomed with open arms and more tutorials than you could possibly imagine. If there’s something you’re trying to pull off, you’ll find it done with an Arduino, and often the code to make it happen is only a few clicks away.

Looking back, we found the very first utterance of the word “Arduino” in Make: magazine. It was issue #5, page 165.

Since then, we’ve covered so many Arduino projects that a list to show off the community would become huge and take forever to read. Instead, I’ve found three projects we’ve constructed that I think really let the Arduino shine.

Project: High Speed Splash Photography Using Arduino

Project: Reddit “Shower Thoughts” Printer

Project: Arduino Controlled Time Lapse Rig

Of course if you’re just picking up your first Arduino, those project might seem completely out of reach. If you prefer a more structured approach to learning than hunting for tutorials on the internet, I’d suggest picking up a book, and we just happen to have one in our MakerShed, written by the co-founder of Arduino, Massimo Banzi!

Be sure to let us know what you’re doing to celebrate Arduino Day by sending in your projects to our submission form so we can share them with the community. For this special event, you can also tweet your projects with the hashtag #MakeArduino and we’ll collect them up and share those too!