#726 – Arduino's Invisible Touch with Massimo Banzi

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released June 17th, 2026. Episode 726. Arduino's Invisible Touch with Massimo Banzi. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Massimo Banzi: Hi, I'm Massimo Banzi. And I'm a friendly nerd.

Chris Gammell: A friendly nerd that I think people will, yeah, I think they might know this. In fact, I could probably just listen to a recording of you just saying the word Arduino over and over and over again. I think it's just like the friendliest way of saying it. I try not to like co-opt it myself, but I just think it's such a friendly way of saying Arduino. It's got that, like the turn, you know, the Italian turn on it.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, in one of my previous life, I co-founded Arduino and I worked on it for 20 years.

Chris Gammell: And so obviously, Arduino has been a topic of many, many different episodes on the Amp Hour. You know, my own work with it, you know, just throughout the history of it. And we're going to ask Massimo about it here. But let's start in the present day, actually. So you're working on something now called Super Moderno. Am I saying that right now?

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, it's Super Moderno. It's a project that I started, which is about kind of explaining technology in simple terms. We do some of the content in English. Some of the content is Italian because I'm Italian and I live in Switzerland, but near the Italian border. And I feel like, especially in a place like Italy, we need to tell people the behind the scene of the technologies they use every day. Because if they don't understand that, it's not about turning everyone into an engineer. I've already done that with like a few million people with Arduino. But my objective is to tell people, hey, you know, this thing that you're using also has this side effect that you need to understand because otherwise you become, let's use a big word, a slave to the platform that you use every day. And I think that the values of open source and a lot of the values that have driven all the work I've done are important to kind of keep a balance between the things that you do with big corporation, with big companies and the things that you do by using some more local, private tools that you control. But people, most of the people don't really understand this. So Super Moderno tries to do that a little bit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and obviously you have different feeds. You have the Instagram feed and TikTok as well. Yeah, yeah. So like obviously short shareable content that's, I think that is that kind of like, it's almost like public service at a certain point too. Like I'm just like, hey, this stuff's out here, but there is stuff under the hood, right? That's kind of like understanding it and building mindshare around that.

Massimo Banzi: Well, a lot of the content at the moment is about the history of technology because that's a passion of mine. And also I think, again, the idea that you should tell people about the history of technology because a lot of the things that happened in the past, they are a simple way to understand some of the things that are happening now because what's happening now with AI already happened with a bunch of other technologies in history. So we've seen some of the things already. So if we explain to people these things, they can make connections. And also I try to tell some stories sometimes of people that are not Americans. So I'm going to say this in a nice way, but normally a lot of the history of technology is actually narrated by Americans, which is great because obviously the firepower of communication the US has, but there's a lot of people who have done incredible things with technology in other parts of the world. There are sometimes less well-known. So also my job is to tell Europeans, look, it's not that only the people in the US are able to do these things. We can also do these things. We initiate the ARM processor that is running a lot of the technologies around us was made in the UK. So I'm trying to add to the plate, maybe we talk about Steve Jobs a little bit less and we talk about somebody else. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: How about a little Enrico Fermi up in here? Can I get an amen, right?

Massimo Banzi: But also, you know, Federico Faggin, who invented, you know, the...

Chris Gammell: Oh, I don't know him actually. So in the history space, what are some of your, what are your favorites places to talk about in terms of historical eras?

Massimo Banzi: Well, one of the companies that I love to talk about is this Italian company that was called Olivetti. It was started in 1908 and they made typewriters, then they made mechanical calculators. And then in the 50s, they started to make their own computers. So they actually made what is technically the first fully transistorized mainframe in 1959 with the advantage they started after everybody else is that they could jump directly into transistor by skipping vacuum tubes. But they also built this computer, which is called the Programma 101, which is the first... some people in Italy call it the personal computer. It's not true, but it's the first desktop computer. So it's a programmable machine from 1965. One of the first customers was NASA. They used it to give it to the engineer so they could do calculation on orbits and other, you know, space related during the Apollo program. So there are pictures of this, you know, NASA engineer with like the pocket protector and, you know, the classic engineer that you imagine from the 60s and this Programma 101 computer on the table, computing, orbits, and other things. So in a way, it's incredible that it's not very well known. In the US, at some point, they bought this company called Underwood, which was an American company making typewriter. And they did quite a lot of... At some point, you know, one of the computers that Olivetti made in the 80s was sold in the US by AT&T. So they were quite... Well, obviously, the 90s arrived, the world changed, and I think they managed to survive for 100 years and then at some point, they couldn't continue. But they were the first company, and I promise I'll shut up in a second.

Chris Gammell: No, this is great.

Massimo Banzi: I love this. They were the first company, in my opinion, at least in technology, to apply design to everything. So now, obviously, when you look at the current time, everybody says, oh, Apple, Apple, Apple. Effectively, Olivetti, already in the 30s, they were hiring designers that were designing the products, the posters, even the buildings where they worked. They were designed by famous architects because, you know, the family who founded the company had this idea that people had to work in a beautiful environment. This way of applying design, you know, it's crazy because sometimes if you go to this website where you buy design objects, you will probably pay $1,000 for an ashtray that was designed for Olivetti in 1972 because it's an icon of design.

Chris Gammell: That's like the, have you ever seen that Frank Lloyd Wright like office building with like the downlights and stuff like that? And it was just like the margins that support those sort of things too. It actually like, it ties really well into that story of like, well, like the 90s and like when margins just kept getting squeezed and squeezed and squeezed like that, that hurts so much when there is this kind of like beautiful kind of everything else around the product, it usually is the first thing to go as well. And it's like, but then the differentiator on the opposite side is like companies that can support their margins with it like the apples of the world and keep their design sensibilities. They get the longevity of having this reputation as well.

Massimo Banzi: But, you know, it is a fact that's been studied that if you apply design consistently in what you do, you get an edge over other companies because clearly your products stand out. They connect with people in ways that are not, sometimes not so direct, but then you look at something like, oh my God, I don't know what, but this thing is amazing. Then maybe, you know, so I think that's also a little bit my background. I mean, obviously I'm a, I do electronics, but I work, I work with designers a lot in the last 30 years, I would say.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Just to take it back to the early Arduino days as well. There were some ITP people, there was, I forget like all the folks involved and stuff, but the early, the early days of Arduino as well, like you have a design background and electronics background or where do you fit in that mix?

Massimo Banzi: So technically, I studied electrical engineering, but I spent most of my career at the beginning doing software. Then I was working in an investment fund, but I was not really loving it. And so I left. And then a friend of mine said, hey, you know, they opened this interaction design school in the north of Italy. So it's not far from where you are. And it is in the town where this company Olivetti used to be. So they said in the building, they used to be the research and development building of Olivetti. They created this school. They need someone that can help them for a few weeks to prototype some hardware. So I went thinking, I'm going to stay a couple of weeks. I'm, you know, I'm just, you know, giving myself a sabbatical. So whatever. And I ended up staying for four years. So from two weeks to four years is a big jump, but it was cool. And my work there with the students was to, these are students, that practice this kind of design where you have to build prototypes that people can actually try. Because the only way to see if an object or a service or a website, whatever you're designing really works is to build the prototype and show it to people, let them try, observe the people using your prototype and iterate. There's no subsistence. When you go around the world and you buy tickets for the subway or for the bus, you understand immediately which ticket machines were designed by someone who followed this process and the ones are like, oh my God, they put windows in a box.

Chris Gammell: I just went through the Madrid subway system and I think it's in that latter group of the, it was rough.

Massimo Banzi: Absolutely. Especially this, this interaction design is really about removing the friction that people find every day when they interact with technology and make their life better. So I really love the mission. And so I was trying to explain to students who are amazing, very intelligent, but they have zero electronics and they have a little bit of software because they do like a couple of weeks of a month of software development before. So I started to figure out different ways on how to make prototyping with electronics very simple. And I was doing electronics as a kid. I started at seven years old doing electronics. So I started to imagine how did I learn when I was seven? Because I didn't learn from a book looking at the formulas. You know, it was probably going to be a bit too much, no? So I learned by making. And so I tried to transfer that process into the way we did different actions. And then in that process, I started to meet a bunch of interesting people. So I met my friend, Tom Igo, who teaches at the ITP in New York. He's been teaching there for, still teaches there. And so I met him. We started to chat about our, you know, he has students, we have students. And we figured out there was a lot of points of contact. So I started to keep in touch with him. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And ITP kind of has the same vibe too, right? Of like that, that like multi-domain cross-functional type stuff, right?

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, absolutely. They have incredible students, incredible professors, and they try to kind of mix. And also they have been, they were created, the name is Interactive Telecommunication Program because they were started in the 70s. So all of these things of using computers to internet, they didn't exist. So they, you know, they were precursor of a lot of these things. So Tom teaches there, is also teaching students how to create with electronics. So we started to compare notes. We realized, I mean, also I like Tom, he's like a brother to me now, but, so I like him. And we had in common and so, okay, let's talk, let's figure out if there's, and also for another project that I did at school, this Spanish guy just randomly showed up. but then, you know, I realized that I, this is my friend, David Quartieres, and we also realized that we had a lot of things in common because he was teaching in Sweden and he was facing the same issues that me and Tom were facing. So we started to work on figuring out how to make prototyping simpler. One of the things that happened at the time, which I think was one of the things that pushed us was that a lot of the schools in design schools in the world, they were using this thing called the basic stamp, which is a brilliant product from this Californian company. But honestly, already in the early 2000, he was a little bit showing his age. And also, once you imported this thing in Europe with all the tariffs and all the other things, you ended up spending more than $100 for a microcontroller. You understand the students, they tend not to be very creative if they are afraid of blowing up $100. So we had to figure out how do we bring the price down. So in my mind, I had this idea that I wanted to build something that would cost 20 euros, which is more or less how much you would pay for a pizza and a beer in Ibréa because I wanted the students to have said, okay, I'm going to skip a pizza. I'm going to buy a circuit.

Chris Gammell: They burn that every weekend, right? Yeah, that's all you.

Massimo Banzi: I wanted to give them something comparable. It was like, okay, you can skip a pizza and then you can have a piece of hardware. So that's, I guess, how the team got together.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and I mean, the early days as well, I mean, like, I just think about the kind of the contemporaries as well. So like timelines we're talking about, this is what, mid-2000s, right? I mean, timeline.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, I started teaching at the school in 2002 and I did a bunch of different projects. So for example, in 2003, I made my first prototyping platform, which, you know, wasn't amazing, but I learned a lot of things from it. Then one of my students did his thesis on that. So he built this project called Wiring and then me, Tom, David, and one of my students, David Mellis, who is an amazing technologist, we kind of re-built a new platform based on all the things that we learned and all the things that we did because David and Tom, they both, you know, had different experience. So we merged everything together with this idea that we wanted to be open source. It needed to be open source hardware. We didn't know that thing existed, but we wanted to apply like a license to hardware that would encourage people to kind of, I don't know, we wanted them to be able to build upon the work that we did and then it needed to be simple to use. We were very lucky because from the MIT, we had this professor called K-Series and he and another person, they came up with this language called processing, which is a language that was designed for designer and artist to learn how to program a desktop computer. And so, they actually had an incredible amount of great ideas that they tested on the field. so we borrowed a lot of things from them and then we made this development environment which is basically was their development environment with Java removed and plugged with C++. So, there was like a surgical operation and then we started to experiment and then also since I was in this town of Ivrea where Olivetti had been for 100 years and they had been making hardware there for 70-something years. So, I was able to find places that would make me PCBs there and not in Shenzhen. People would assemble circuits there. So, I started to go and get PCBs made and I started to... So, we had a path to actually make this thing in a way that were like... I had to drive 15 minutes to get to the PCB factory. You know, it's not something that you can do very easily now. And in Ivrea it's still the whole electronics business still thriving. Arduino still manufactures a very large part of what they do in Ivrea, Italy.

Chris Gammell: And that was... Olivetti was there but it was also... I just remember around that area as well there's a lot of automotive as well. Is that right? Like the industrial base that's in that part of Italy?

Massimo Banzi: Yes. So, Ivrea it's a pretty small town. So, if you go south just a little bit there is Torino which is the Detroit of Italy.

Chris Gammell: there you go. Yeah.

Massimo Banzi: Torino is the place where, you know, they used to make cars since the late 90s. So, Fiat was there. Fiat is more or less there. Now it's Stellantis but I will... Oh, yeah. Nobody should say that to him.

Chris Gammell: Come on.

Massimo Banzi: There was a CEO at Fiat that was a genius. Unfortunately, he died but he actually went to the US government and bought Chrysler for like a dollar or something like that. and then they created Fiat Chrysler and actually they did a very good job at managing Chrysler so he actually gave back the money to the US government so great. But yeah, so the fact that we had this industrial, you know, they were automotive. There is a lot of industrial automation in that area like a lot. So, obviously, I had all the things I needed were like half an hour drive, you know, so that was a big, big advantage. And so, yeah, we started to make the hardware but also say, okay, if you want, here are the files, make it yourself. So, we started to build around this idea. David Merlis was working a lot on the firmware. Tom was doing an amazing work on looking at documentation, the way we teach things, the methods, the examples. So, that particular part, Tom has this ability to make code very understandable apart from a bunch of million other qualities he has. David Quartier has also, you know, contributed a lot in different parts of the products and I think he also invested a ton of energy going around Europe telling people, hey, you should look at this thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, like mind share and starting to like get into curriculums and stuff like it. That's, that is, that's a lot of work too. Yeah.

Massimo Banzi: So, I kind of started to work more on the sort of thinking about some of the hardware products looking more at the product. You know, if you sum the IDE, the documentation, the examples, the hardware and you put everything together, I was trying to look after kind of how everything ties together and I think, you know, Arduino in the end has a lot of these elements from the work that we've done and all the platforms that we, you know, from processing from the work I've done from wiring. So, there was a lot of different things that kind of came together.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's amazing. And I mean, when I think about kind of like how that timeframe too, I'm sorry, I was, had a brief blip there. I was looking at the first prototype photo that's on Wikipedia as well. And it's just like, it's a hand etch, not hand etch, but like a, you know, single board, single layer etch, do a double layer etch board with like no solder mask on it as well. Like, just to like harken back to that time too. Like, I just feel like we're 20 years on now, 20 plus years on. And it's like, the amount of differentiation from like then to now in terms of just the ecosystem is like wild. You know, like I just remember, I remember paying for my first PCB, which I was, I was so proud of. It was like just a breakout, but it was like, you know, single layer etch made in the US, but it was like, you know, advanced, advanced PCB. And it was like 500 bucks for three boards that were like, like just no solder mask. And it's just like, versus now, like the, the scale difference is like hard to communicate to a lot of people. I feel like, you know, like just like where, where things have gotten to.

Massimo Banzi: So it's interesting because I spent less money, but because I took advantage of one of these weird oddities of doing things in Italy, which is if you show up in a company, you make an order, they will give you the least price. If you show up and you start to hang out and you talk and you interact with the people who run it and you kind of establish a relationship, then it will do things for you, even free. So I, yeah, but obviously I always paid for the PCBs, but clearly I didn't pay the full price, no, because the couple of companies in the area, they understood that the stuff that I was doing at the school were kind of, you know, we were exploring different things. We did a lot of prototypes or interesting projects. So in the end, they helped us. They gave us very good prices. They, you know, worked at night to help us. So I think that was one of the weird things of doing things in Italy that certain things are kind of complicated, but if you understand the system, then you can, you can do things that you cannot do in other places.

Chris Gammell: It's a story that resonates though too, right? You kind of like start with like, you know what sucks when you're starting in electronics, like how hard it is to get like bootstrapped up and it's like, yeah, man, that sucks. You know, like you tell that to other engineers who are working at a fab house and be like, yeah, it was tough for me too. We see this all the time. So that's a great way to build. I mean, I think a lot of this podcast has been built on like, you know what sucks? So like, it is just kind of like this shared therapy session.

Massimo Banzi: So yeah, one of the things that was weird that when I started is because I was looking at this basic stamp and I thought, this is amazing, but it doesn't run on a Mac. My students are on a Mac. It doesn't have USB. I got to fix this. So I started off with pick chips because this is another weird Italian story. So I started off with pick chip because at the time you could watch the football or soccer, as you call it, in the US for free on satellites if you built these cards with pick chips and you basically hack the satellite receiver. So this means that these pick chips, they were sold everywhere in Italy. You could even probably buy it, you know, you would go to like a cafe, you order a cafe and a microchip. And so I started with that, but then I, kind of I struggled a little bit and I was incredibly fortunate that one of the people who was my mentor at the school is an incredible professor from the US, Bill Verplank. He was an incredible person. He was a professor at Stanford for a long, long time. And he said, well, you know, you should look into this microcontroller called AVR because you can program them in C very simply. And since you're trying to transpose something that was written in Java into something that can go on a microcontroller, you could do C++ and you could make the C++ code look like Java so that the people who learn with processing, they can transpose their knowledge almost one-to-one onto microcontrollers. But I think, you know, that I would say Bill, while I was at the school, it taught me so many things which, you know, there is a lot of Bill in there too.

Chris Gammell: That's great. It's interesting about the satellite. I'm trying to find the episode. I forget. It's Chris someone. I forget his last name. But he was someone I interviewed at a conference at a tour camp many, many years ago. And he was talking about like just the amount that drove in the technology industry to like the satellite TV hacking and stuff like that. That a lot of like the hardware hacking community kind of came up around that to try and sell set-top boxes that maybe got around certain things. And that's a really interesting like, you know, just the drivers of technology. I feel like there's some monetary things. Yeah.

Massimo Banzi: I mean, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention. So clearly people in Italy are passionate about football or soccer and they don't, some of them don't want to pay the money that you would have to pay to a satellite. I mean, obviously I don't condone this kind of hacking. Also, I have the advantage that I don't care about football. So I was interested in the simple, cheap availability of the hardware. Well,

Chris Gammell: and how it drives Trent. So like, I'm also remembering now Jack Ansell, the, you know, longtime embedded commenter and similar, he would, you know, he came on the show the second time he was on the show and he talked just about like the number of things in the pornographic industry that was basically driving technology forward as well. Basically, these are the things, you know, like, you know, space human instincts that also drive the technology industry.

Massimo Banzi: Absolutely. One of the nice stories when you got Steve Wozniak telling you that he was making blue boxes to hack the phone system and he said if there were no blue boxes, there would not be any Apple. So there you go.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's just, it's just a little bit of, it's just a little, it's on the edge, you know, it's like the, but the hacker, the hacker mindset persists and I feel like it actually feeds really well into like, you know, boy, boy did the Arduino story kind of end up, you know, started in the education space, but, you know, it fed right back into this, you know, enablement of people that wanted to do things that weren't possible before, you know, like, and I just have to imagine over the years you have, people probably walk up to you and like, show you the thing they built and just be like, yeah, this was enabled by Arduino. You know, it's just like the, maybe the starting point, but also like even significantly past that.

Massimo Banzi: I mean, seriously, the best thing I would say that happened with me and because of Arduino is the fact that I go to places and people come up to me. So I was judging a hackathon of industrial robotics. So we just giant big arms and this group from Belgium won and this woman was like probably 24 at most showed up and said, you know, she was the winner. So she shows up and says, you know, by the way, I want to tell you that I'm doing this because of you because I learned Arduino when I was a kid and here we are. And also I did an angel investment in a startup in Switzerland that does industrial AI for industrial robotics and the woman who founded it, she was building robots with Arduino when she was 15 and now she's 27 and she has a startup doing pretty tough AI for industrial robotics stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I feel like it's, it is that kind of like common, well, saying it now as an interviewer, right? Like we are starting to have people that are younger on the show as well and I just feel like these themes that have come across over the years have always been like, yeah, taking stuff apart. That's always been the origin story of so many of our guests, of course, but yeah, the, you know, the Lego creeps in, the Arduino creeps in, the, everything's in there. Like the, the recipe is very similar. I feel like the, I eat Musa who was on a couple months ago as well. He's a robotics guy. The 3D printer as a, as a middle schooler, like just things like these enabling technologies that are just like, oh my God, like the, what's in the mix. I think about my own kids and what they're going to have. They have, they're going to have run of my shop at some point, but like, you know, just like that as an enabler and like, man, it's the stars.

Massimo Banzi: I mean, if you think about it, there is a, there's a couple of interviews you can probably find about with Joseph Prusa, the, the inventor of the Prusa printers. So the story he tells multiple times is that he started to play around with Arduino when he was a teenager, just building other projects. And then he intercepted 3D printers and then the two things clicked together and he started to make his own 3D printers. So, and now he has a thousand people in Prague building printers that are still open source. I would say largely open source. So, and the stories, these stories to me are what makes everything I've done in the last 20 years worth it.

Chris Gammell: That's really great. And it continues. It continues.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah. I mean, but also I think one of the things that sometimes you struggle in life is to figure out what the hell am I doing here? And so, to me, at some point, yeah, I mean, obviously philosophers say it in a much more eloquent way, but the summary is what the hell am I doing on this planet? And since now the whole planet is going towards, you know, digitalizing, technology is running everything that we do, then if you, if you encourage the largest possible amount of people to understand technology, they will invent things. or if maybe there's like a giant evil corporation, I mean, not corporation are evil, but some of them are unfortunately. So, maybe there's a giant evil corporation that says, no, you can, now you have to do things like this. If a lot of people understand technology, somebody will say, wait a second, I can make my own thing. You know what I mean?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that kind of ties back to the Super Moderna idea as well, right? It's like an escape hatch from that one path that like, especially, I think about like, you know, we've joked on this show a lot as well. Like chip companies buying chip companies, eventually there will be the chip company, right? And it's like, you know, the balm to that is, well, okay, now there's open source silicon that's driven a lot of interesting things as well. There's, there's, there's all of these escape hatches, hatches, there's the hacker mindset that kind of like, yeah, I'm not going to do it that way. I'm going to make my own path and go my own way. And that, that's been very, very encouraging. I am interested in talking a little bit about Arduino IDE as a view into the world as well, right? That, that feels like, you talked about the, the, it's provenance from the processing space as well, but, but actually it's like the brain to computer interface for a lot of beginners as well. And like how that has evolved over time and how it continues to evolve as well. I know that since the acquisition, you're, you're doing, doing your own thing now, but like just the, the blue, the teal box in my mind is, is kind of its own thing as well. And how you see it over time.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah. I mean, I think, and this might sound slightly controversial, but the, I think the only real innovation in Arduino is the user experience. The fact that you create a tool which is simple and you fight for years to keep it simple because, you know, a lot of people join the community and they come from a background where they say, well, I'm an expert and Arduino makes me really quick. so why don't you add these other 20 features that I really love and then I, you know, I spent many years telling people great idea, but not for Arduino because then I would make this tool complicated for the people who are joining. You know, I remember when Chris Anderson started the DIY drones community and then they started ArduPilot and he was talking about how they used Arduino also because it allowed people to onboard the project quickly and become contributors. One of the biggest problems that you have in large complicated code bases in open source is how you take people, put them in the project, get them the tools to contribute and make them, you know, grow. Arduino gave them at the beginning this ability to onboard almost anyone to contribute, I think, and that required fighting because a lot of people are like, hey, but I know Arduino could be so much better if there was this thing. And I'm like, well, Massimo,

Chris Gammell: think of all the checkboxes we could add. We could add checkboxes all over this thing. Exactly.

Massimo Banzi: So I was like, you know, I'm like, but no, because if I do that, you love it, but I can tell you that people are not going to love it. So I think when I say user experience is just enough hardware that's not too expensive, simple, that you can assemble it yourself, but just plug it in, it works. A piece of software that you download it and so just hear a story. When I started working with AVR microcontrollers, I said, okay, I got to, you know, luckily there's a GCC. So I go to this MIT website where they're explaining how to do GCC for the AVR, and it was crazy because they started off by compiling the compiler. And I was thinking, my students, you know, my students would look at me in the face and get lost who wants to compile. No? Exactly. So the objective was, I want something that I download it, I double click on it, and then I plug a board, and five minutes later, I'm blinking the damn LED.

Chris Gammell: That is the magic. That is the time to first blink. Yeah.

Massimo Banzi: But then, you know, for example, the first few, I remember when we started Arduino, during the summer, I went to Sweden where my friend David Quartieres was living and teaching, still lives there, and teach there. And we spent basically two weeks in the summer just writing a ton of examples because the idea is I want the example baked into the idea. I don't want people to have to find them. So this was the, you know, me and David were very passionate because we understand that people sometimes they open an example, they run it, and they go, okay, hear me out. if I change this number, what happens? You know? So the vast amount of examples that then became also the vast amount of libraries is what helped people get going really quickly. So these things are small parts of the innovation, but the big picture is me, Tom, David, and David are interaction designers. So what we care about is the big picture of the product. That's why the IDE for 20 years has got seven buttons. Obviously, now Arduino has a much more advanced IDE, and that's obviously, it's got a few more buttons, but not many. So it is still quite, you know, as a beginner, you launch it, you click a few buttons, and you get, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I think this is going to be very like armchair post hoc, you know, analysis type of thing as well. But one thing that's been interesting to look at as an outsider, just as an outsider, is the, you have built through the popularity of that, right? I think one thing that drove a lot of this is the popularity that it just built community around it, right? Like you built community, right? The Arduino community built itself, but also there's, you know, a curated aspect to the community itself. that then becomes this critical mass. And then an interesting thing from my perspective then is seeing the ad hoc standard nature as well. And I definitely want to talk about the persistence of the Arduino Uno form factor over time, but I think even the Arduino IDE has this kind of this funneling interface. I used to work at a startup that was building a library that made it compatibility there. And it was before I understood how any of this stuff worked, but one of my coworkers was there basically taking freescale parts and doing the mapping so that, you know, basically the blink sketch worked with it. The, you know, the analog reads, the analog writes, all of them, all of the lower level mapping stuff. And that as like a forcing function and industry is something that I don't think industry even knew they needed. And I, I see it now actually from the Zephyr side, which is really interesting, like that basically it's like someone's out there defining this thing and then all the chip companies have to like go to it. Whereas chip companies left on their own, they're going to be like, well, we're going to do our own thing. And, you know, the users are going to do what the users have to do. But, but having a third party that defines the standard, whatever it may be in the Arduino case, a very beginner friendly as well, it is a forcing function on the industry. It's like so necessary. And I love Zephyr for it now too, but like that is like a, just, you know, like a come to Jesus moment of like, hey, chip companies, people need to use your stuff and there's software involved. That is like a base level thing.

Massimo Banzi: I came back to Linux after many years that I, I was using Linux when I was very, very young. Then obviously for some types of work reason, I had to use Windows very little, but then Mac, and now I'm back to Linux and some things are still, you know, a bit rough around it. One of the things about the idea that I think it was important for me and the other founders was that first of all, we thought, okay, be nice to have a business model around this because it would be good to get paid to do Arduino instead of get paid to do a bunch of other things and then do Arduino between midnight and 2 a.m. And then we thought, but it's very important, it's much better to have a small slice of a really large pie than, you know, be the full owner of a muffin, you know what I mean? So you don't want to be like the full owner of something small. It's much better to build with other people, allow everyone to get their own. And so one of the things that we decided to do at the beginning was that the support, you could plug in the support for other boards. You know, I didn't want someone who wanted to make their own board with an architecture that we didn't support, that they had to rebuild the whole thing. And also I think we standardized a little bit the language around some functions that were originally developed for wiring and then we evolved it. But again, we started slowly to define this idea of the core, which in Arduino language is kind of that. But because one of the early ideas was I don't want to be forced to use one specific microcontroller. At the very, very, very beginning, I built a prototype using SDCC compiling for the AT51 microcontroller because I wanted to try. And I use a hammer and hack Arduino to run on this thing because in some parts of the world they are still, you know, I saw in India, people are still learning with AT51. so it's one of those, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, I was using one last year, so I mean, they're still around. They're everywhere.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, they're still around. So my idea was we got to figure out a way how to make this modular in a way that you can. And now one of the things that happened with Arduino is that you can really write a piece of code and then you can switch from a menu a different, completely different board and in some situation it would work 90% of the time. you know, once I had this, this became so well known with people that don't understand very much about technology. A friend of mine, she organized the class where she wanted to use these nanos that have the Raspberry Pi processor on it, the RP2040. But she prototyped the whole class using another type of Arduino nano and then she just assumed that you just change the menu and then she gave these students a bunch of new pixels and obviously they didn't work because nobody had ported the NeoPixel library to that processor yet. So she called me all upset and I'm like, look, dude, it doesn't say anywhere that you, everything is just, but people are so used to the fact that you write the code and you change the menu, select another board, change a couple of things and you go. And I think that was that time that my friend called me and she was upset with me. I thought this is a victory because in the mind of people that are not, you know, my friend is a designer, she doesn't really know very much about electronics. So she was able to prepare a class, imagine that everything was going to magically work. It means that 90% of the time it magically works.

Chris Gammell: That's right, exactly. Yeah. And it does almost like, it almost brings it into like the true like software domain where people are like, well, it's a software, it's going to work on my computer, you know, like a cross-platform, whatever. And that, boy, I've been doing a little more Linux-y type things lately and yeah, it's C all the way down most of the time, you know, it's like, yeah, the kernel is, it's low level, man. It's like, oh, wow. Yeah, that's great. Well, speaking of low level, you know, so just the form factor then as well. It's interesting to me now seeing the Uno header, like I feel like that I could spot from a thousand yards, you know, like just like dev boards, everything, you know, oh, why did this vendor make this board larger? And so, well, actually, they're just going to maintain compatibility. And so, now, I use the Uno header as another API to blank, right? But I think about like connectors as an API for hardware, right? And like, and the Uno header is basically like, you know, it's basically an API, it's this defined standard, defined layout, whatever. And I'm just curious how you see it. I know there's like a story behind it as well, but how it's kind of taken on a mind of its own as well.

Massimo Banzi: Well, one of the things that when I was working with this student of mine, Hernando, on the wiring platform, one of the things that I started to, I was looking at, I have seen this PC 104 format, which was an industrial PC format where the boards kind of stuck on top of each other, you know, as we say in Italian as a lasagna because there's all this layer of, you know, and so I was like, we should find a way to create modules that you snap on top so that you can expand your hardware very quickly. So the first project that, the way I met David Quartier is because the school paid him to do a research project on building accessories, this kind of, this kind of, then when we started working on Arduino, Arduino, the name Arduino comes from this guy from Ivrea, they used to be the first self-proclaimed king of Italy in the year 1000.

Chris Gammell: Before Italy was Italy actually, right? I mean, that was like,

Massimo Banzi: oh my God, yeah, Italy was Italy very late in the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Italy is about 100 years younger than the US.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Massimo Banzi: Obviously, the individual cities are thousands of years old. So the idea is this Arduino guy, obviously, in Ivrea is everywhere because he was born in there. So we said, okay, let's call it Arduino. The name Arduino comes from this bar where I used to go drink aperitivos in the evening because I was kind of, you know, we didn't have an idea for the name. Everything sounded stupid. So I was like, let's call it Arduino. And then, so my friend David, who is always like thinking laterally, said, wait a second, if we are making a circuit that stacks on top of the Arduino, that's the shield of a king.

Chris Gammell: Ah, there it is. That's why

Massimo Banzi: they are called shields.

Chris Gammell: I never knew.

Massimo Banzi: There you go. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, and also we thought, okay, then for the shape, I had this box that contained business card on my desk, and it was the same size as a credit card. So I thought, you know what, the standard credit card, which, you know, it's got a weird shape in European terms because it's actually originally in inches, so it's like 85 by 55. But I thought, small enough, something that you can manufacture very easily. Also, the advantage that I was using this software called Eagle, that was free until this, like, 100 by 80. So I thought, wait a second, so if I do the board like this, it fits, no problem, in the free version of Eagle. And so, we started to make different shapes of that, and then, at some point, I thought, well, if we put the connectors on both sides, if you make these modules, they're going to, you know, they're going to mechanically, you know, be very stable because there are two lines of pins. And then we started to evolve that pin out multiple times. Also, we went to this PCB maker who is like somebody who should write like a TV series only on this guy who made the PCBs because he was a hilariously crazy guy. And as the point, he said, you should make the board blue because I heard that the blue color is less tiring for the eyes of the workers. I said, okay, we are in favor of workers. Let's make it blue. And then David was like, we can't make it rectangular. Rectangular is boring. Nobody will understand that it's us if we make it rectangular and green.

Chris Gammell: Now we're talking branding. We're talking, yeah.

Massimo Banzi: Exactly. Because if you look at the world like a designer, then you understand that the branding, that there is a touch, invisible touch in everything. You know, even when Apple makes these cables, you can see that the white of the rubber on the cable is the same as the plastics on the connector. To get that white correct on two different materials, there's probably a person in Cupertino who spends her life matching colors.

Chris Gammell: The Pantones everywhere.

Speaker ?: Exactly.

Massimo Banzi: So the idea was, okay, let's make it like this. Let's make it this shape. Let's make it with these two lines. And then David kind of sketch this shape that's a bit strange. In fact, when we went to the PCB maker, he said, why did you do it like this? What's the purpose? I don't know, being ourselves instead of everyone else. And so it was like, okay. Then it was funny because I had to touch up the design one couple of times just to send it to the manufacturer. And I think I inadvertently moved a connector of half a step. and so that's how we ended up manufacturing. And then we realized that two connectors are too close to each other. But the funny thing is that imagine how stupid I was, you know, because we were discussing and I said, guys, we already made like a couple of thousands of these boards. We cannot tell people that we're now.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, that also probably feels very familiar to people. and then like, you know, they're living with it. Yeah, I've lived with many happy accidents over the years.

Massimo Banzi: But in the end, you know, it made the board recognizable. There was this weird thing that obviously it helped you orient the board because there was, you know, so in the end, that format really worked because a bunch of people started to make their own shields because you just make a PCB and you stick it on top and it works. We made a few shields so that people could see what are the, so for example, the first motor shield was actually a derivation of the shield that we built for wiring. So, yeah, so, and also at the time I was working, since Arduino wasn't really paying me any, well, actually was not paying me any salary, I was actually putting money into Arduino. So, I was working by making interactive installations for exhibitions, museums. In Milandre is this, massive event in April, that's called, in Italy it's called the Design Week, but in Italian it's called Salone del Mobile. There's like almost half a million people showing up in Milan for a week. So, all the big brands, they have big exhibitions. So, I was working for some of those brands making this exhibition. So, that drove also the creation of more shields because whenever I was trying to make an exhibition, I thought, oh, I need to interface with this and this. Okay, let's make a shield.

Chris Gammell: Yep, yep. And it's like stress testing the design as well. Yeah, I mean, like this is great. I mean, I think one of the

Massimo Banzi: great things about Arduino the first year is that we were teaching a lot. so, everything that we built, we battle tested with the students. If you look at the evolution of Arduino boards, at the beginning, you had to press the reset button at the right time to get the software on the board. And that was incredibly annoying. And I remember I was doing this workshop in Schwabischbund, which is a city in Germany. And the students... I was going to guess that, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Didn't sound super Italian there, yeah.

Massimo Banzi: So, I was in this city in Germany, lovely school, great students, but I don't know, someone there was having a lot of trouble pressing the buttons. And then I thought, wait a second, if I solder a capacitor between these two pins, the serial port is resetting the board for me. And I just soldered that capacitor kind of flying on the back of the board, and it worked. So, I was writing to the other guys, I made this thing to reset by itself. And it was a happy accident, because the serial port moves this DTR right at the moment. And if you put a capacitor there, you generate a reset pin. But it was because the students were having some trouble.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Yeah, I remember reading about the DTR. So, it's like CTR, DTR is like the usual clear to send, detect to send, or something like that? Yeah, it's the

Massimo Banzi: handshake in that we inherited from the old RS-232 standards. But if you use a serial to USB adapter, they provide that too. So, you can... So, I was just, you know, I said, let's try, let's solder, and it worked. So, a lot of these things happened because we were studying the students doing things all the time. So, every product was kind of iterated through that. And then I was doing projects, and then I would invent new, and David also worked with me on some of these projects. So, we invented new boards because we were, you know, doing projects.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. that kind of early crucible, the crucible of having those direct, you know, having students too, especially, you're going to have the target audiences, like the beginners, the people that are going to be hands-on, but also not necessarily experts. They're not shy about giving feedback. That's really, really great. That's, yeah.

Massimo Banzi: Especially, like, the very first years of Arduino, I, me, and David especially, we spent, like, a ton of time going around the world, mostly Europe, but then the U.S., teaching people workshops. So, I remember in November 2005, I ran a workshop in London, UK, and people paid to come. The platform was, like, four months old. It was working by miracle. But the buzzword between the, sort of, artist community kind of spread, and I was able to get 20 completely insane people who paid, like, 150 bucks to spend a weekend learning about Arduino. And if you multiply that by hundreds of workshops, then you start to create these local communities, and then you start to understand all the different issues that people have at different plan. So, that community building part is super important.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it is boots on the ground kind of stuff, right? I mean, I feel like this propagated word of mouth as well, but, like, yeah, the true, like, building true adopters, it is, revising, getting feedback, that sort of thing. I mean, I know we're already pushing on our hour of time here, but... I have time. A lot of it has happened since that time, too, right? Oh, yeah. So, like, you know, so that's the, we got through, what, year two, three, we're talking about at this point.

Massimo Banzi: I mean, at some

Chris Gammell: point it became a business, right? It became, like, it became the thing you did as well. I mean, transitioning into that, the scaling the boards, scaling the size of the company, scaling the size of the enterprise, like, surely other things, I mean, even just driving adoption into the industry as well, and specifically with, like, where we've ended up, right? I mean, so people know we've talked about on the show that Arduino was acquired by Qualcomm a couple months, years ago, year ago? I don't know how long it's been, but... It was October. October, okay. So six-ish months ago, seven months ago. You know, that is a huge scaling curve all the way up there. In the interim, what were some of the happy accidents at the beginning? How did those drive kind of the happy interactions in the middle?

Massimo Banzi: Well, I think... So one thing that I have to say, which was very important at the beginning, then we skip a few years forward, is that I would say if we had built this as a European-only platform, we would still be doing some other job. I think one thing that really changed things was when Tom brought it back to NYU, and people started to use it at NYU, and then the U.S. has always been consistently the best market for Arduino, the single biggest market, also because it's a cultural thing. Like, in Italy, people will say, your platform is amazing, but I don't, you know, I have a platform that works. It's expensive. It doesn't work really well. One of the things I always loved about Americans, many things I love about Americans, is that if you present something new and interesting and useful to an American person, they will say, Monday morning, 9 a.m., come visit me, we'll make this happen. That thing is what made Arduino what it is, because if we had to rely on Europeans, probably not. So when Tom brought it to NYU, that expanded the U.S. market, so that gave us, at some point, the ability to generate a about enough revenue to have our own company, and then create a business model based on sometimes licensing the brand to other people, which kind of allowed us to kind of work on an ecosystem. So that growth went on for a few years. I think there was a part of the history that I don't talk too much about, but at some point, I would say, unfortunately, one of the people who was with us at the very beginning, he kind of tried to take control of the company, so we had to sue this person, and that created a lot of drama. That also ended up on blogs and magazines, so that was like a very hard time, because it was a complete waste of energy, and I think it set us back a little bit because we were busy basically fighting this battle. But I really didn't want someone to take over the work that we had done, and this would have fundamentally changed the way Arduino was. So I have to say that the reason why Arduino is still here and is still doing that is because of ARM Corporation, ARM Limited being a UK company, because when I needed someone to give me some money, lend me some money to actually take back control of the company, I was I have to say the management at ARM was amazing, the CEO, Simon Seeger, I would be forever grateful to him because he met me on a whim. I was in California, so let's meet. And then he said, okay, we'll help you. And with their help, we were able to take over the company, build it up again, really push into all this direction of looking at industrial application. So a lot of people started to use Arduino to do industrial automation, and they were using Arduino Megas. So we started to build projects, products for industry. We expanded the education, we expanded a lot to the IoT. We started to go into tiny machine learning at the beginning. So AI on small. So ARM was incredibly incredible, incredible. So I've never really talked about this, so this is the first time I really kind of openly talk about this. But they say if you have Arduino now that follows the principle, you have to thank those people.

Chris Gammell: That's great.

Massimo Banzi: Yeah, that's great.

Chris Gammell: It's interesting, too, as like another ecosystem player, right? I'm sure that admiration was probably mutual as well because of thinking about lowering the barrier for, you know, Arduino lowering the barrier for more people entering into the chipset market. And, you know, it just it does kind of rising tide lifts all boats.

Massimo Banzi: For me, when I when we were working on Arduino and we had the 8-bit platform, one of the first things that I really wanted to do was I need a 32-bit platform and I need ARM. I wanted to have an ARM processor. So effectively, we did the first product using an ARM processor from Atmel, then they became microchip. So for me, ARM was an amazing, you know, it's an amazing history. I love the openness of the ecosystem. So I think what they did, which was incredible for me, is that they understood that we were a positive force inside the community to drive the adoption of ARM to as many people as possible. So they helped us. But obviously, what they did was quite risky, you know, they could have lost everything. So at the end of the day, ARM did the two things that are amazing. They supported Raspberry Pi and they supported Arduino. So they basically were instrumental in supporting and getting the two most important, I would say, two between. I mean, there's also the ESP32 is a different story, but two of the most important platforms that help people build things. So you got to meet the management at ARM. During those years, they understood that the ecosystem needs to be nurtured. And so I would say, you know, amazing, amazing vision.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's also interesting that, as you mentioned, like the Arduino ecosystem bringing on higher power chips, but then also in involving more things in the IoT space, you know, the space that I'm in and love, you know, like the connectivity side was built on top of ARM embed for a long time as well. And so that also kind of the, you know, the ability to like become this compatibility layer, just kind of come back to that compatibility layer piece that really starts to fit together between, between the, the ARM, the ARM Arduino kind of co-work in that way as well. That makes a lot of sense actually.

Massimo Banzi: I mean, I was, I was also very lucky because throughout the history of Arduino, I was able to, for example, I did this partnership with Intel probably some of the stuff that we did together wasn't so, you know, so, so effective in the end, but we actually built a lot of it.

Chris Gammell: Well, Intel kept killing all their embedded processors, so that's not really on you. Yeah, but no, but it's

Massimo Banzi: because, you know, I was working with a team at Intel that was incredible people, but then they had this management that sometimes, you know, changed their mind. Yeah. So it's, it's one of the problems, you know, I also worked with an amazing team inside Microsoft doing crazy things, but then the management, you know, yeah. What was the Microsoft stuff? Well, at some point we actually had Windows 10 for IoT that was supported by the IDE, so you could actually compile Arduino code for Windows 10 IoT. We did a bunch of different projects, but then the problem with this big corporation is that the management changes and then they said, okay, we don't care about this. But, you know, I had a chance to partner with a bunch of people and so we did all these interesting projects in different directions with this processor that we used from Intel is where I experienced the first time doing machine learning on a small board because they had this pattern matching engine and they said, oh, we're going to remove it from the processors. No, don't remove it. Leave it. We'll figure out a way to use it. And then we started to do TinyML back in 2017. 2017. So, yeah, I think it's we were very lucky that we went through all these different partnerships. We met all these people. So, obviously, we got to the point, I think, where we started to take investments from people, from big companies like Bosch or Renesas or we also had a California Investment Fund, Colanzo Partner. And at some point, this was quite crazy for me, but the Italian, how do you say, not government, but

Chris Gammell: Regulatory Agency or something?

Massimo Banzi: No, no, no. Italy has a sovereign fund that invests in companies. So, they approached me and they invested, so my own birth country invested money into Arduino. And I was very happy that, you know, we were able to kind of give back through that as well. So, there was like a lot of, we did a lot of work going in building a very complicated, well, very simple to use and very complicated behind the scene IoT platform. So, anyone can bid like an IoT product in seven minutes. So, there were all these things that were done, but I think one of the things I always felt is that what Arduino needed was to have like a somebody who knows and has the ability to make advanced silicon part of the family. Because at the end of the day, if you're trying to fulfill the mission of Arduino and still be profitable, it's problematic in the end because obviously, then, you know, the people who make the chips, they make all the money in the end, you know, or because your product gets cloned a million times. So, we contributed a lot to Atmel slash microchip because they are still selling a ton of Atmega 328. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: They're sold out for years, right? I mean, like they were, yeah, the end of dip parts. So, it was like, it was like tiny little bit of silicon with big old polymide.

Massimo Banzi: And a lot of those projects started off as Arduino prototypes that then become a product, you know? So,

Chris Gammell: Right, right, right.

Massimo Banzi: So, I felt that there was the need to be very connected to someone that has advanced silicon. And I think when we met Qualcomm, it was amazing for me because I always respected the company. They do hard, serious stuff. You know, they do 5G, 4G, 6G. So, they do super advanced technology. They also do all these other, you know, they do different processors of different kind. They make this high-end processor for computers. So, they do, they are like real, hardcore engineers. And they make chips. So, they don't make money like other companies by stealing your personal data for making money. They make money by doing real science and engineering. Also, as a simple, as a other side note, they were founded by an Italian. But that's not...

Chris Gammell: Oh, I didn't know. Okay, interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Massimo Banzi: Now, there's a famous algorithm called the Viterbi algorithm that you study when you study digital and the Viterbi was an Italian guy from Bergamo that emigrated to the U.S. And he was one of the founders of Qualcomm. So, what's not to love about the company that also founded by an Italian guy?

Chris Gammell: That's great. I think, you know, this is putting a, you know, a good kind of wrap-up on this. Obviously, we made it a kind of problem to modern day. But I think one thing that is interesting, given what we talked about with the Arduino IDE and, like, the challenge of that and, like, the challenge of that going forward, really just the challenge of technology getting more complex, right? We were multiple processors, multiple capabilities, machine learning, all the AI that's on chips, all that stuff. When you look at this stuff, when you think about it from your super moderno side of things as well, how do we still draw people in? How do we still, like, make this kind of interaction layer that, like, brings people in? But also then, I don't know, like, sometimes some things are, you know, like the Einstein quote is, like, things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sometimes the simpleness is, like, we can't make things much less simple than they are, and they're very complex still. So, how does then Arduino, 10 years from now, continue to work on that challenge from your perspective?

Massimo Banzi: Well, so, two things. One thing is that I always felt that Arduino is actually mostly a formula. It's this idea that there is always another technology that can be made simpler to understand, that can be turned into a tool that can be used by many, many people. So, if you look at it as a formula, you can apply it a number of times. So, now the Arduino, with the help of Qualcomm, made this Arduino Uno Q. It is a super compact Linux machine, but they developed all this tooling around it that you can build incredible things, and you don't touch Linux at all. You do everything through the tools. So, that thing, imagining an application model that uses containers and microcontainers, so there's a whole thinking behind that. If you can apply that formula to anything else. So, that's one thing. The second thing is building things in layers. So, one of the things that I always loved about Arduino is that you can blink an LED with, what, seven lines of code. Obviously, any professional developer look at it, oh my God, this is stupid. They say it a lot. But no, there's a very high level of encapsulation. Obviously, that is very quick, very productive, but maybe not optimal. But in Arduino, you can strip a layer, and now you are operating one layer down, and you have much more granular API. You're not happy about using C++ in microcontrollers, which some people, you know, okay, just strip that layer and go down to, I don't know, CMC's, and you're programming your microcontroller. So, the idea is try to build things in layers so that I can start as a beginner with something that's incredibly abstract, because if I can get you to do something cool with like five lines of code, then you will stick with me, because the next episode is going to be better. We're going to do something amazing with 25 lines of code, no? But a lot of people, the first experience they have with the technology sometimes drives what they think about technology, like, okay, this is not for me, it's, no, leave me alone, this is, no. But if you get them a small success at the beginning, so if you look at these two formulas, so the Arduino formula and this kind of layered approach with high level of, you can apply one-to-one that to developing with AI models, you know, you can apply that to like a ton of different technology. I am waiting for the day that somebody will develop an Arduino for biology, where, you know, the same principle will be used to do biohacking, DNA, you know, that's

Chris Gammell: good for that. Yeah.

Massimo Banzi: Like, you know, CRISPR for everyone, you know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That is good. I think it is interesting, is like the, this, like the onboarding experience for all technology, it still needs to be graspable. It still needs to be friendly in certain ways. And yeah, it does sound like the Arduino formula, it still has to be there. I think the, the challenge is just the scale of the, the underlying compute. That's just off the charts these days. It's insane how much this of it, I mean, like the Q is amazing and the Ventuno is now going to be like even bigger. So like, yeah.

Massimo Banzi: It's an insane platform. I played with it. It's insane. Somebody was making a joke saying, well, you know that the Ventuno Q Arduino has twice as much RAM as the new MacBook Neo. It's true. It's got 16 gig of RAM. But I would say one of the things that's important is that it's very hard to try to do all of this and then have a sustainable business with open source. Because I think one of the things that we have to remember about Arduino is that I would say Arduino went through some hard times, a lot of times because people were taking and monetizing and not giving back. So we need to nurture and protect all of our open source ecosystems. Because the moment that the grifters become way more than the contributors, then they die. And when they die, really bad things happen. Imagine all the different problems we had with unmaintained open source libraries that then created big hacks. So it's a responsibility of everyone listening to say, hey, you know what, I'll donate these 10 bucks to this open source project. Or, you know, I'll buy these boards from these people and give them some money. Then maybe the next board I'll, you know, buy a clone or whatever. But I buy quite a few things from platforms like Tindy or Electrons, or I donate money to open source projects. Because I think that if we don't incentivize people to create these communities where there is a contribution, then everything rolls back to pure profit. Everything's locked down, proprietary.

Chris Gammell: And then the next generation doesn't benefit from it as well. I feel like that's another through line there as well.

Massimo Banzi: The next generation goes back on the sofa with an iPad watching the movies that Apple thinks you can watch.

Chris Gammell: That's right. That's right. Well, Massimo, thank you for everything. Thanks for being here, of course. But thank you for, you know, all the 20 plus years. I'm excited for hearing more about the stuff you're doing with Super Moderno. And where can people find you online these days?

Massimo Banzi: Well, if you search on the different social media, like Instagram, Super Moderno, it's like Super Modern with an O at the end. So SuperModerno.tv, I think it's on Instagram and also on TikTok. And also we publish long form videos like projects that I build with the UnoQ. They find them on YouTube.

Chris Gammell: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for being here. I hope to chat soon.

Massimo Banzi: Thank you very much for your time. Bye.

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