Arduino is seeing steady growth beyond its origins as an open-source hardware provider, having recently created partnerships with AWS and others to expand the reach of its board and software development services into industrial and manufacturing settings.
Arduino has 32 million active developers worldwide and earlier in 2023 expanded on its PRO line first introduced in 2020 to reach enterprise customers. About two-thirds of its customers are US-based, and the Italian-based Arduino is understandably trying to capitalize on its biggest market.
In August, Arduino announced it had joined the AWS Partner Network to deliver enterprise-grade Arduino PRO products that work with AWS for commercial and industrial companies. In addition, Aduino Cloud is a device and data management service built on AWS that now processed 4 billion device messages each month.
ABM Vapor Monitoring chose Arduino Cloud for its business application and cut its development time and engineering services costs. “Arduino PRO provides us with an end-to-end commercial platform,” said ABM’s co-founder Adam Bishop in a statement. “Using Arduino Opta PLC connected to Arduino Cloud, we monitor commercial buildings across America to ensure regulated air quality standards are met.”
Guneet Bedi, Arduino SVP and general manager, said Arduino is able to integrate industrial hardware with advanced cloud services and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Last month, Arduino also announced a strategic partnership with integrator DMC, a consulting firm with custom software development services for manufacturing and testing services. The announcement focused on the partnership providing commercial systems using Arduino Opta PLC and Portenta Machine Controller as well as OEM product development with Portenta and Nicla modules for embedded apps.
“Arduino and DMC will jointly establish a higher standard for what enterprises can anticipate from open technology,” Bedi said in a statement.
“Developers need to reach out for support for system integration,” Bedi told Fierce Electronics in an interview. “We’re accelerating our partnership program.” DMC is so far Arduino’s largest system integration.
Bedi said Arduino is also focusing on building up the talent pool of embedded developers, partly through work with community colleges and apprenticeships. Arduino is also working with MxD, a digital manufacturing innovation center based in Chicago.
In addition to such cooperatives and partnership, Arduino is keeping true to its hardware roots, recently announcing GIGA Display Shield, a 4-inch touchscreen display focused on helping Arduino makers deploy fast and responsive graphic interfaces for their GIGA R1 Wi-Fi projects. It includes a digital microphone from Bosch and a 20-pin camera connector and an RGB LED. It also supports mouse and keyboard input.
GIGA Display Shield sells for 60 Euros or about $63. It is currently listed as sold out on the Arduino online store after first going on sale Sept. 28, but buyers can be notified when more stock is available.
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