A limited-edition collectible Arduino

Friday 26th November, 2021 - Bruce Sterling

*That’s an interesting development.

ARDUINO UNO MINI
A LIMITED EDITION COLLECTOR’S PIECE.

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10 million Arduino UNO boards have been sold to a worldwide community. It’s time to celebrate with a limited edition collectible.

The world’s favorite development board has gone mini. Arduino’s most iconic device is reaching the incredible milestone of 10 million boards sold.

Uno means “one” in Italian. It was chosen in 2010 to mark the primary importance of this board in the product line, five years after the Arduino project was born in a design school in Ivrea to help design students create projects in a simple, understandable way.
From there, Arduino became one of the favorite tools for the growing maker movement, and for people who wanted to learn electronics, coding and to build something by themselves from beginning to end.

“Some of the projects are funny, others are world-changing, and a huge number of these projects have an Arduino UNO at their core,” says co-founder Massimo Banzi. “Our values are still the same; we make tools that empower people, help them create whatever they want while enjoying the process, and to make technology accessible. We now make higher performance and more sophisticated products, but the Arduino UNO is more than a product. It’s an icon.”

SIMPLICITY, USABILITY AND IDENTITY
Since 2005 Arduino has grown in so many ways and with a vast range of products, but we’ll never forget that bar in which our founders decided to name the world-changing little board, and call it “Arduino.” By 2009, the project that would become Arduino was gathering steam. Made by a team that Make magazine once referred to as, “designers, teachers, artists, and techno-hippies.”

The notion of an easy to understand user experience for development environments was very prominent, although the people who would become the founders of Arduino hadn’t necessarily articulated it even to themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to see that this guiding principle was there from the beginning.
“The UNO is an arrival point of a large number of small experimentations and incremental improvements,” Banzi adds.

Design immediately became a key aspect. The Arduino image was conceived by a former student of the Ivrea classroom, Giorgio Olivero, who was entrusted with the new Arduino identity. “The strength of our current image depends entirely on the outstanding work Giorgio Olivero’s done” says co-founder David Cuartielles. “Nowadays it’s really common to do these kinds of things, but back then on the maker scene it was really unusual to put so much into making things look good, and putting a focus on the user experience.”
Colors, branding, logos, user experience and a refined focus on usability and recognizable quality across everything Arduino did, from the UNO to the website and the packaging. The UNO’s launch signaled a transition from DIY success story to a foundation platform for makers, engineers and creators around the world.

ARDUINO UNO MINI LIMITED EDITION
Now, after more than a decade, the special edition collectible is a celebration of the UNO and the community around it. Designed and manufactured to the highest standard, this board has a unique black and gold color scheme. With the limited edition UNO, Arduino wants to celebrate this timeless icon along with all the makers and the millions of projects contributing to this incredible success story.

A SPECIAL PACKAGING WITH PRINTED EFFECTS
Arduino’s design team created a unique packaging that celebrates the UNO’s milestone. The packaging plays with black and gold contrasts, thin lines and negative spaces. A little jewel to celebrate the Arduino community. Each item is unique and numbered on the PCB.

TIMELESS ICONS, MINIATURE SIZE
The UNO mini also features a USB-C connector, a feature commonly requested by experienced makers. The board’s design has been enhanced with castellated holes so that it can be SMD mounted on another board, which turns the UNO mini into a building block for custom PCBs moving from prototype to small series.

Available as a limited edition for 40 EUR/45 USD.

About Arduino
Arduino is an open-source hardware, software, and content platform with a worldwide community of around 30 million active users. It has powered thousands of projects, from everyday objects to satellites and complex scientific instruments. This success has been made possible by combining a wide variety of electronic boards, easy-to-use tools, a collaborative community, and practical project examples to suit all levels.

Press contact
Luisa Castiglioni l.castiglioni@arduino.cc