In this article, we explore how open source is not just for makers anymore, and actually makes great business sense. Business Benefits of Open Source: The Pragmatic Side of a PhilosophyChoosing open source is not just a philosophical stance; it is a strategic decision with tangible benefits for businesses across a variety of sectors: manufacturing, building automation, smart cities, e-mobility, logistics, safety – and any industry where technology is key.Here are 7 reasons to consider open-source solutions:<ol><li dir="ltr">License Included: Escape the burden of hefty license fees, with an open-source model that completely eliminates the need for these costs.</li><li dir="ltr">Limit NREs: Non-recurring engineering costs decrease when you use an open and accessible platform designed for seamless integration.</li><li dir="ltr">No Vendor Lock-in: The growing Arduino ecosystem is not a trap; it’s a versatile offering that allows exploration and evolution, without imposing switching costs.</li><li dir="ltr">Extensive Documentation: Over the years, Arduino has built a treasure trove of documentation, tutorials, and tech specs to support users at every stage of development.</li><li dir="ltr">Community-Sourced Resources: Our vibrant community of over 33 million users ensures a constant flow of libraries, examples, and shared experiences.</li><li dir="ltr">Effortless Integration: Arduino products seamlessly integrate with third-party solutions, enabling cost-effective retrofitting and interoperability.</li><li dir="ltr">Lower Labor Costs: Arduino’s accessibility and user-friendly design mean lower labor costs, with a large pool of engineers familiar with the platform.</li></ol> Shared Commitment, Shared AchievementsArduino was founded on principles of open source since its inception in 2005, and continues to be at the forefront of the movement. Our recently released <a href="https://blog.arduino.cc/2024/01/11/the-2023-arduino-open-source-report-is-out/" target="_blank">Open Source Report for 2023</a> unveils a range of achievements that exemplify in how many directions this core value translates into new projects, products, resources and more.Key highlights include joining the Zephyr® Project, releasing five new open-source hardware components (Arduino UNO R4 Minima and R4 WiFi, Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi and GIGA Display Shield, Arduino Nano ESP32), and a plethora of updates to the Arduino IDE and command line tools. The pivotal role of the vibrant Arduino community is highlighted in the report too, with over 1,000 new libraries and 205 open-source tutorials shared on Project Hub in 2023.&nbsp;Another initiative fueled by the community’s contributions is <a href="https://docs.arduino.cc/" target="_blank">Arduino Docs</a>, a collaborative repository launched in 2021 as a testament to the brand’s commitment to sharing knowledge. The archive has grown into a comprehensive resource hub, and the Arduino Team’s efforts to keep a sea of information updated, organized, and easy to navigate for all recently led to a complete overhaul of the platform’s design and architecture, unveiled in January 2024.&nbsp; Unlocking Innovation with the Open-Source ParadigmIn a world where innovation is the lifeblood of success, adopting open-source technology platforms like Arduino can be a savvy move for entrepreneurs and engineers worldwide. The tangible business benefits, coupled with an outstanding track record of community collaboration and continuous improvement, position open source as not just a philosophy but a pragmatic pathway to sustained success in the ever-evolving landscape of digital transformation, leading to cost-effectiveness, innovation, and a future-proof tech ecosystem.

Open source makes business sense. Photo: Alberto Morici for Arduino

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation, businesses are constantly seeking ways to stay ahead of the curve, optimize processes, and drive innovation. One powerful approach gaining widespread recognition is the adoption of open-source technology platforms – and for good reason.

Unleashing Business Potential with the Advantages of an Open-Source Approach

Capping lines in modern factories are machines of incredible speed and precision, capable of installing thousands of caps on bottles and containers every hour. Based in Canelli, Italy, <a href="https://www.arol.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AROL</a> is a leading provider of innovative and custom capping and closure system machines, with over 25,000 pieces of equipment currently installed around the world. With production lines processing up to 100,000 bottles per hour, maintaining their machines’ speed and ongoing reliability is critical to operations. In other words, any outage or unplanned downtime would be detrimental to meeting production quotas and costly to their clients.<h3 dir="ltr">Adding Brains to Speed for Improved Productivity</h3>To support diagnostic, prognostic and predictive maintenance, they decided to draw on their experience to develop a smart solution able to gather data from industrial equipment and the surrounding environment, creating a machine monitoring system based on remote wireless sensors that could be powered by battery or 24 V.&nbsp;The project faced specific challenges in the fact sensor nodes had to be mounted in rotating capping turrets, fitting in a small space and yet always remaining connected to a communication unit at the base of the line. What’s more, they had to perform part of the data processing on the edge, in order to not overload the central system. And of course, the upgraded capping machine had to be made smart without costing sensibly more.<h3 dir="ltr">An Innovative System for Predictive Maintenance</h3>To accelerate the process, AROL relied on a cost-effective, open-source system based on a combination of Arduino Pro’s Nicla Sense ME and Portenta Machine Control. This allowed their engineers to work with advanced sensors and high computational power, while still leveraging the ease of off-the-shelf components. With the support of a problem-solving and forward-thinking partner, the company quickly developed and tested a working solution: “The Arduino team was very proactive in understanding our requirements and providing a business-oriented solution with a customer-focus approach,” commented Denis Ruffino, R&amp;D technical director at AROL.AROL fitted each of the 15 capping turrets in one of their machines with a compact <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/pro/hardware-nicla-sense-me/" target="_blank">Nicla Sense ME</a>, providing vibration and temperature detection thanks to state-of-the-art, onboard Bosch Sensortec sensors – as well as the&nbsp;computational power to process part of the data directly at the level of the sensing nodes. At the base of the machine, one <a href="https://www.arduino.cc/pro/portenta-machine-control" target="_blank">Portenta Machine Control</a> was easily mounted on DIN rail to concentrate communication with all the sensors via Bluetooth®.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzA4NDQ4MzMxNTIxLVBNQ19sb3cuanBlZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 300px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Having chosen an open-source solution, AROL is poised to scale up the idea with limited refactoring – and further upgrade their advanced capping machines, raising the bar of innovation for their industry.

Seeking a way to make their high-speed production equipment even more reliable and productive, AROL recently decided to develop an innovative solution to enable data monitoring and predictive maintenance, upgrading their offering with an Industry 4.0 approach.

AROL Tops Capping Machines with Smart Maintenance

The new Arduino UNO R4 Wi-Fi board provides built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication as well as a 12×8 LED matrix display to give makers, hobbyists, and engineers an extremely versatile prototyping tool.


Getting to Know the Arduino UNO R4 Wi-Fi

The collaborative nature of open source projects brings together people across the world to work towards improving and monitoring our natural resources. 


Open Source Projects for Improving Air and Water Quality

An overview of the architecture of IIoT and how it is developing to drive the scalability of Industry 4.0.

The engineer's guide to Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0

<h1 dir="ltr">The beginning of Arduino and a roadmap for accessible tech</h1>“When I started in electrical engineering, it was relatively inaccessible,” explains Kurt. “You would buy a breadboard and some parts and try to connect them and maybe get a basic circuit board. But when I wanted to teach my kids, I went out and bought an Arduino board, and within 10 minutes, we had something working.”The mantra at Arduino is ‘making complex technology simple,’ and that’s reflected in its origin story described by Fabio. Arduino came about to solve the challenge faced by electrical engineering teachers who wanted a way to help their students who had low or no technology background get started quickly. It’s evident by the way that Arduino continues to champion for its products to be used by makers of all kinds that this principle is still driving the company.&nbsp;<h2 dir="ltr">Arduino in the wild</h2>More than 30 million designers engage with Arduino every year to build or build on, many more millions of projects. During their discussion, Kurt asked Fabio to describe some of his favorite Arduino projects from the continually growing archive. The Wevolver community shared that curiosity, asking Fabio the same question as part of a <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/article/community.qa.with.arduino.ceo.fabio.violante" target="_blank">community Q&amp;A</a> in 2019. Back then, Fabio described the incredible project from the Tokyo Hackerspace, which developed a radiation sensor shield for the Arduino platform to help people in Japan measure radiation levels in their everyday life following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The board’s design was open hardware and the source code was released in general public license (GPL).In this conversation, Fabio talked about one of the most exciting segments of the Arduino project family as the advent of the open-source 3D printer, which in turn helped enable the creation of the open-source drone industry.&nbsp;<h1 dir="ltr">Arduino and AI</h1>AI will be deployed in Arduino in a number of ways and have huge impacts on how people understand and apply deep learning. Fabio observes that we are now at the point where at least part of the capabilities of technology like Siri and Alexa can be bought into tiny battery power devices. This opens the use of voice control in tiny edge devices with a massive range of applications.&nbsp;<blockquote>“There is a tonne of new sensors available, from pressure sensors to accelerometers which can be combined with the next generation of ultra-low-power microcontrollers and ultra-low-power neural networks like Syntiant chips so battery-powered devices can be anywhere; augmenting you as an individual and augmenting the possibility of what you can do.” -Fabio Violante</blockquote>It’s likely that at some point soon, these sensor-embedded smart objects will be able to give feedback on the way we use them, massively increasing our ability to learn new skills. These objects won’t be used to create instant experts, but novices will be able to gain a useful proficiency level almost immediately - an exciting promise of pervasive AI.&nbsp;To help deliver this promise, Arduino needs to stay ahead of the curve of innovation and continually develop new ways to deliver complex information to everyone. Our challenge is to keep up with the rapid development of technology and continue to make this increasingly complex stuff accessible, explains Fabio. This happens through a combination of a dedicated ‘translation’ team in-house and by partnering with visionary companies that allow Arduino to take the latest technology and democratize it. Kurt agrees, asserting that, “For deep learning to be truly pervasive, it's going to have to become the domain of the everyman.”Arduino contributes to the future of pervasive A.I. through continuing its mission of reducing the barriers to learning about electronics and programming with its proven project-centered approach that induces its users to learn rapidly through action. This approach encourages users to move from technology spectators to actors by engaging directly with hardware.&nbsp;<hr>Companies like Syntiant are continuing to make AI processors smaller, lowering their power consumption and making them more accessible through partnerships with leaders such as Arduino. Innovators like Gustav Hoegen or Anouk Wipprecht (<a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/bram.wevolver" target="_blank">see our previous fireside chats</a>) are gaining more opportunities to apply artificial intelligence in novel ways.&nbsp;This video is part of a series of fireside chats in which Wevolver and Syntiant partner to engage with global innovators. I encourage you to stay tuned and to follow <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/syntiant" target="_blank">Syntiant's profile</a> for more of these conversations.

Fireside Chat 'The Voice of Innovation' #3

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