Fabio: So the unbelievable advantage of Arduino was that they made these accessible. Not only open source, but even possible for many people that had zero skills in electrical engineering or software engineering to tinker with technology and solve real problems, from feeding their cat to powering a 

Announcer: plant.

You're listening to Augmented Ops, where manufacturing meets innovation. We highlight the transformative ideas and technologies shaping the frontlines of operations, helping you stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of industrial tech. Here's your host, Natan Linder, CEO and co founder of Tulip, the frontline operations platform.

Natan: Today we're here with Fabio Violante. How is my Italian accent? Fabio. 

Fabio: Perfect. Perfect. 

Natan: You are the CEO of Arduino. I don't think there's a single listener who doesn't know what's Arduino, but you'll introduce yourself in a second. I'm really excited about this episode. It's a really cool walkthrough how one of the most important open source communities for hardware and software hackers evolved, I think over, what is it Fabio, been how, how old is Arduino today?

What is it? 

Fabio: So the company was incorporated in 2008. So I joined Arduino as CEO in 2017. So I'm the CEO of Arduino now for seven years. 

Natan: Yeah, so you're based in Italy? 

Fabio: Yes, the main office of Arduino is in Torino, Italy, in the north and western part of Italy. 

Natan: And how did you become the CEO of Arduino? What did you do?

How did you get involved with this hardware ecosystem? 

Fabio: It is a crazy story. So basically, I did my PhD in computer science at Politecnico di Milano. That is the one of the major technical universities in Italy. And, um, it's crazy because I'm sort of the grandfather of Arduino. Because I was visiting a, I think not so many people know this story, but basically I was visiting a new school that a major telecom operator in Italy, Telecom Italia, built in Ivrea.

That is an historical place in Italy, it's close to Torino. The question is what is 

Natan: not a historical place in Italy? 

Fabio: But even this is an historical place for technology, so we had the Olivetti in Ivrea. Okay, so Telecom Italia decided at some point to sponsor And a school that was really new, uh, was a school basically revolving around the physical computing, combining design and technology into the same place.

So they had international faculty like the MIT Media Lab, but it was 2001, 2002. So I was a visiting student last year of my PhD, and they asked me if I want to teach electronics. And I said, guys, no. I am a software engineer, so I know some electronics because I did three courses, so I can do a fantastic whiteboard of operational amplifiers, but that's my electronics.

But I know somebody that can be helping you quite a bit with teaching electronics to designers. And I introduced Massimo Banzi, the founder of 

Arduino, 

to the school, and they hired Massimo. So they had Massimo and Massimo did a great job. So I did my PhD to go back to your question, and then I started my own software company, enterprise Software.

We were doing capacity planning for data centers. Sold the company in 2010 to an American company and started commuting between Boston, Houston and San Francisco from Italy because my wife didn't want to move. So I've been CTO for BMC software from 2010 to 2015. One of the four business units focusing on enterprise and data centers.

And then Massimo called me back and said, okay, I may need your help. So I joined Arduino as an investor and, uh, became CEO two years later. So this is basically a compressed version of our story. 

Natan: Yeah. Like I said, Arduino is a household name in the maker community, in the hacker community, I'd say, but evolved so much, you know, from hobbyists to education to industrial use, even fully fledged products are being built around it.

And it's been forked, you know, so many times and really ushered a new era in the accessibility of incorporating embedded computing. Do you guys have like a cool dashboard and a counter of how many Arduino products are shipping or how many boards and give us, give us a bit of a taste of this phenomena.

Fabio: Yeah, I think that from the impact of Arduino, it has been really amazing. And one of the reasons why I joined Arduino is the impact that Arduino had on the world, not only on kids, but in general in the world. So we are an open source platform, not only software open source, but also hardware open source.

Of course. So this means that for most of our product, people can go on our website, download the Gerber files, go to a manufacturing site and create. They own Arduino. The only thing they can do is call it Arduino. They can call it whatever they want because Arduino is our trademark. But basically, we count almost 20 million original devices sold by us.

And potentially, you can multiply this number by a factor of 15 to get the size of the number of products that are on the market. And this is 

Natan: all the forks and the different boards and the 

Fabio: Yeah, the majority are there. Copycats, but legit. So what we call clones. So we have clones and counterfeits. So the majority are clones and some of them are evolution.

So we have a lot of partners and friends that built better systems or different systems, adding some components here and there. But on top 

Natan: of that, there's an ecosystem. So it's like all the Arduino shields, all the, Hey, this can run on the software. And Hey, here is a real time Arduino. piece of software and all sorts of, you know, it's not just the proper boards that you supply.

Yes, 

Fabio: absolutely. No, the software part, I think, is even more important. So when it comes to software, what we do at Arduino is creating the development tools, like what is called the Arduino IDE. And of course, we put a lot of energy in the last few years to renovate and we are now at version two of that. to integrate a development environment for Arduino.

But what is very, very important is the software ecosystem. So we have more than 7, 000 libraries developed by us and the community. So normally we take care of the complex problems, like the very hardcore problems, but the community develops like application code, sensor code, artificial intelligence code.

So this is a thriving ecosystem. Now we reached this year 33 million downloads of the Arduino IDE. 33 million. Let me ask you something 

Natan: on that point, you know, electrical engineering is not something you can just stumble into. I mean, if you invest, I guess you can, but did you imagine that this phenomena would happen?

You know, now I think probably guys are looking back your, I feel it sometime too, is that you're not questioning it. It's like, it is real, like people are using it day in and day out, but back when you got started, because I'm trying to, Get you back into the moment where like there's a spark and saying, Hey, community is going to come up and speak up and get us moving here.

Fabio: Yeah, so I was not part of the team at that point in time, but, uh, I heard from Massimo and, of course, Massimo was a friend of mine, and he's a friend of mine, so we were sharing this kind of experience, and this thing became ubiquitous, and, uh, it was solving a need, so the need was getting away from, uh, The complexity of embedded systems.

So we were chatting before about embedded systems, but you had these data sheets of microcontroller. They were relatively simple pieces of technology, but user manual were thousands of pages. So think about, you know, a designer, an architect, a Maker or whatever. A normal person in the world, even with a certain level of skills, having to face like a few thousand pages user manual just to turn on an LED or turn on a fan.

That was impossible. So the unbelievable advantage of Arduino was that they made this accessible, not even only open source, but even possible for many people. that had zero skills in, uh, electrical engineering or software engineering to tinker with technology and solve real problems from feeding their cat to powering a plant.

Yeah, doing the Christmas 

Natan: tree lights and like, you can't count the applications of Arduino at this point. 

Fabio: Yeah, talking about, you know, use case that were impressive for me. So for example, you remember when there was the nuclear accident in Japan? Yeah, 

Natan: of course. Fukushima. At the time we were at the Media Lab, you know, you would go to the Media Lab.

I don't think there was a room without like five Arduinos, you know, and Joey Ito and his project was like really helping with the Fukushima thing. So 

Fabio: yeah, so basically the community built a radiation counter, a Geiger counter that was open source. So basically, suddenly the community built a sensing network.

That was humongous in terms of sites, a number of nodes that were measuring radiation both in Japan and on the West Coast of the US. So the SafeCast network, which is the name of it, this was basically starting from the MIT, from using Arduino and creating something that was safe. Unheard of. And the scientific community was opposing that saying, okay, these guys are makers, these instruments are not tuned.

But then after a few years, this thing became like a big source of information to understand, crowdsourced information to understand how the radiation pattern will evolve over a long period of time with a high granular data. They found statistical meters to correct the data. So basically, uh, This is the power of this kind of technology.

So making the impossible possible. That's the basic thing about Arduino. It's not our payoff, but basically making something that is unthinkable of something you can do the day after. 

Natan: So my background, I spent years working for Samsung. We were like hacking on, uh, Mobile phone boards and stopped counting the variants of microcontrollers that I've seen.

And, you know, it's like, you have the engineering team, the people putting together the boards and then bootloaders and like a kernel level and, you know, until you write the first application line of code, like how much sweat, blood and tears have to go through the stack to get the first sort of real microcontroller to do X, Y, and Z application.

So that for me, like, was like, Oh wow, I can rapid prototype suddenly. With things that before I had to have like a team of dozens of people, and it was really game changing. And I think now in the hacker space, in fact, we trivialize it, you know, meaning that we expect that to happen. And I think this is, you know, the coexistence of the embedded open source boards movement, and of course, Arduino leading the charge, there's plenty others, but also Linux and the operating system.

So those two communities kind of came up together. So my question We are now solidly in this era, so there's no going back, right? And there's like an interesting feedback loop between, you know, you see Qualcomm doing an open source board and you see Intel did open source boards, you know, all sorts. I mean, it's not mainstream, but you're seeing that on one side.

And on the other side, you see is like the community say of Arduino specifically going into. The industrial enterprise right going into real professional use cases and it's no longer a hacker board or a maker board it's actually this is how we're getting the job done. And this is a very interesting case study in how citizen development emerges i'm wondering how you experienced it and how are you thinking about this now 

Fabio: no absolutely so you're totally right so basically the fact that we shaped all the complexity we that we know opened up.

A whole set of possibility. So when I joined Arduino, it was quite impressive because we went to the Maker Faire in San Mateo. I don't know if you have been there. Oh, the Maker Faire. We used to do 

Natan: Maker Faires with Formlabs, my other company. Mostly in New York was like the craziest shit when down in New York and with all this Maker community.

Fabio: You know, but it was impressive for me because Massimo said you should come to San Mateo, New York for the Maker Faire because there is interesting community. So I go there and the first guy that stops at the booth is a guy from one of the biggest automotive brands. 

Natan: Uh huh. And 

Fabio: He told me, okay, we did like the entire cockpit of the car XYZ, by the way, I have one of this car and the name has a six number, so important German car.

He said, we built the cockpit using Arduino Omega as a prototyping tool. I said, okay, fantastic, nice to see this. And then the second person come to the booth, like after two or three makers, and he said, Oh, you know. We work for electrical injection. We do all the testing of electrical injection in production with Arduino.

I said, okay, so I was supposed to be here for Maker Faire or things like that. So one after the other, we had Coca Cola, Pepsi, we had a bunch of people, Apple. So you're an enterprise company. So basically, suddenly I realized, okay, looking at our numbers, If you look at the way Arduino is distributed, so we have a lot of sales from the distribution channels, like tier one distributors that I think makers don't even know they exist, like Arrow, Abnet, uh, you know, Mouser, Digikey, these guys, so maybe Digikey is somehow in between, but basically then I connected the dots and say, okay, Arduino is more into the enterprise than the makers, so of course, is fostering the makers community together with the Spark, Fynada, Flute and all these guys, but at the same time, there is an enterprise community that is using Arduino because probably they graduated with Arduino when they were in school.

And now they are taking the simplicity of ease of use and the rapid prototyping to their enterprise job. And basically they are using Arduino as a convenient tool to get rid of complexity, to get faster time to market, etc. 

Natan: Reduce risk. At the end of the day, we're engineers, you know, so like the less glorious part of our job is to reduce R& D risks so we can ship products.

Fabio: Yeah, speed up stuff and reduce risk and having quick turnaround saying, okay, this idea is fucked up, then let's do, let's go for the next one. Let's tweak it. So I was surprised by that. So I went back to Torino, to the team and said, guys, we are makers, but we are also very important for enterprise customers.

But we don't have a path forward for enterprise customers to go to production with Arduino because we had like these AVR based boards. Do you remember the APR? Microcontrollers, 8 bit microcontroller. And today customers are looking at Cortex from ARM, more sophisticated microcontroller. They need more RAM, flash, they need more connectivity, security, and all these things.

Why don't we develop something that will help them take Arduino from the idea and the rapid prototyping of the cockpit into something that they can take into the enterprise for their daily activities. 

Natan: And what's your vision? Obviously, continue to support them to make rapid prototyping faster, cheaper, more flexible, push innovation on one side, but did you also think about actually shipping real product on the platform?

Fabio: Yes, so that was the idea. So when we started with Pro, the idea was to provide a tool or a set of tools that will allow them to go from the ideation to production with system and modules on one side, And for the enterprise customer, that was a big surprise for me. So enterprise customers, of course, they make the electronics.

So when you look at the Arduino, no, it is always like a sort of synonym for electronic board with a bunch of wires that look like a bomb. 

Natan: Yeah, breadboards, 

Fabio: breadboards with wires, etc. So the enterprise customer told us, okay, Especially SMEs, so small and medium businesses, they said, of course you have naked electronics, but we don't want to spend even a single hour of time adding sensors, etc.

Do you have something that is more finished? So one of the things we did, and has been very successful, is to create what we call a micro PLC. So basically, if A ar, we know programmable logical controller that is really certified, so it's UL certified. You can just hook it up into an electrical panel and add the flexibility and programmability of ar we not an enterprise industrial process.

And that, that was shocking. The community saying, okay, oh, now I can do what I need without having to hook up wires and breadboards. Custom boards, et cetera. So we did this kind of thing. So right now in the pro space, we have these two lines of products on one side system of modules and intelligent sensors make electronics.

So that's the DIY 

Natan: makers R& D 

Fabio: style transformed into the enterprise version of. So this means in the enterprise, we have like extended temperature range. We have like more powerful microcontroller, dual core cortex M7. We are a little bit far away from the AVR times when we were 8 bit, etc. So we have RAM, flash, security, secure boot, and all these important things, you know, today.

But on the other side, we also have finished products. So we have this PLC range of product and expansion. That's a lot of people really to think about the application, they do not have to think about, you know, the hookup and the electronics and custom sensors, custom tab boards to deploy around that. 

Natan: I want to get back to this in a second, but I have to give you like a few stories on how I experienced, uh, probably parallel.

So, you know, we spend a lot of time on shop floors, on factories, and you know, the people who represent the citizen development movement that. We're building and to be clear, I don't think it's just this company or that company, Tulip or whatever. I think it's the same movement. You know, I think this isn't developers and operations that we meet.

Yeah, they choose Tulip and maybe they choose HiveMQ or whatever platform, you know, to get stuff on the software domain. You know, they sit with the DigiKey catalog and they sit with all sorts of other things because, you know, they need Andonlite to light up and they need a, Simple clicker sensor to push and they need the e stop or whatever it is.

And sometimes it's like in the classical thinking, it's like control and system integration and all that kind of stuff. But in my world, it's what they call factory hacking. Like they hack their factory because they need to get it. Of course, it's more pronounced in smaller medium sized companies that have maybe more freedom or less resources and that allows them to Experiment faster with also technologies.

So what is the vision or the vignette I want to share with you? You know, I walk through different factories and, uh, you start walking the factory and you see, and here we used Arduino to do blah, blah, blah. And you see like a little contraption attached to some sensor attached to some machine. And then you see like, Okay.

Here we did the quality jig, because we have to get all the sampling right, but we didn't want to pay for a complex DAC or whatever, you know, I don't know what. So these kind of stories, and you see teams of people, they're just putting it together and then it's theirs and they own it. They did have issues scaling it up for sure.

Sometimes they did have issue with integrations, like, you know, making it talk to other systems, but the hacking was very genuine. They were solving their own problems. And I think that's very profound and that leads me back to your PLC story because the other thing you saw in the same hacks is like, oh, yeah, on one hand, it's amazing.

But on the other hand, it's tough to maintain. And I think this is where, you know, this product line that you're bringing with the Arduino approach to PLC market is fascinating to me. Why? Because if you think about it from historical perspective, I don't know if it's like the last decade or more, but there's been like this endless chatter on what is between the PLC and the APC, you know, like, when can we finally write code to these microcontrollers and why is it not happening faster?

And I think the phenomena and like what you guys are doing are changing that. But let's talk about the business side for a second. The market is dominated by a lot of vendors who are, you know, great companies, done a lot of amazing product. What are they getting wrong? Like, why are they not changing fast enough?

What is this sort of tension between industrial grade and non industrial grade, where in fact some of the application you're supporting today, I'd say with your line, Which you call it pro, and I do think it's pro to be clear, but you know, when you put it next to like XYZ brand of traditional PLC, the perception is different, and so how are you feeling about that, and what are you seeing as it comes to the tensions between PLC and APC?

Fabio: Yeah, so the point is, you know, when you are in a dominant position, and of course, this is an industry where you have dominant players that have been historically there for ages, sometimes they lose some of the aspect and the changes in the surrounding environment because they have this dominant position, you need them, et cetera, like cars.

So nobody was anticipating Tesla. You are there, sitting there, making your fantastic German, American, whatever, Italian cars, and then Elon Musk comes with Tesla and say, okay, the industry is going to be different. So it was like more or less the same thing. So basically they were sitting there saying, okay, we don't know how to make car much better than anybody in the world.

But then we have these new kids and new people going from university, from the MIT, going to the enterprise, and they say, okay, guys, at university, we learned like agile paradigms. We learned different languages, et cetera. We respect what you do, but we don't want to work anymore with these kinds of things.

So basically, we somehow anticipated the trend of these guys moving into the enterprise and wanting to do something in a different way. 

Natan: And 

Fabio: I'm not saying. The old way was wrong. In fact, our PLC can work with the existing PLC languages. 

Natan: Do you support now the software ecosystem comes to play because it's Arduino?

So you can get libraries for OPC, you can get libraries for MQTT, even Node RED Runtime can run on Arduino Pro, I 

Fabio: think. Absolutely. So you can do the open way of doing stuff with C, C and MicroPython in the future. We have a lot of MicroPython activities as well. And you can also use the traditional languages for PLCs because there is a ton of legacy code.

Of course, I see all the PLC languages, ladder logic and all these things. But the beauty of Arduino is that you can also combine them. 

Natan: What do you use today for Ladder Logic on the Arduino side? 

Fabio: We have our own IDE that we partnered with a company that is helping us, so we have a runtime for the PLC. And you can use the Ladder Logic there and the other five Can you share who 

Natan: is the provider there for the listeners?

So it's 

Fabio: a company called Axel. Axel. It's an Italian company that is working with a bunch of the known names in the space. 

Natan: So they provide the full help to people who opt to use the Arduino Pro Opta PLC, like kind of the classic IDE, like ladder logic type of thing. Exactly. But you can also do all the things that Arduino and probably the combination thereof.

Fabio: Yes, you basically can augment the classical ladder logic also with blocks coming from pure Arduino functions written in Arduino code because our PLC is also multi core so you can run like some logic into one of the core and some other logic in the other core. You can connect to the cloud. You can implement into the PLC also AI function.

So those are the things, the flexibility that we add, because of course, when you buy a PLC from one of the known brands, uh, you know what you get into the specification. It is not flexible. It is not open. So it's meant to do X, Y, Z. So with Arduino, you can give a new life to your device every day. 

Natan: You know, in this podcast, we're trying to stay away from direct product propaganda.

I'm mostly talking about Tulip, yeah, because the voices are so important. But I have to share a bit about, you know, our Edge. io. I don't know if you've seen this product, because, you know, a decade ago, Matt Aldrich, who is one of our key guys who built the hardware team and one of our key engineering leaders here, was We were like sitting there, two guys from the Media Lab and whatever, we need, what do we need?

Analog, some high level protocols, digital, opto isolation, 24 volt. You go out and you try and find like this kind of edge gateway or IO or whatever, you're like, either you need to couple things together. Or you have to pay like 2, 500 bucks or whatever it is, like for some crazy piece of equipment from XYZ vendor, or, you know, you could hack some stuff with Arduino, but back then, almost 10 years ago when we started, it's like not around.

And we, we did what Media Lab people do, which is not very different than what you guys did and made this hardware to package our software, you know, in a way. So we can have an amazing seamless experience, UI, UX and connectivity for our customers that they want to. Plug in this and plug in that and, you know, work in our no code environment, low code, no code environment, and so on.

And of course, to do that, we need operating systems. So we take Yocto Linux and we harden it and we secure it and OTA and all the things, mostly to support the customer experience. And I'm just wondering, like, would we do that If you had this product 10 years ago, do you know what I mean? No, exactly. And maybe this is, you know, I love to end on predictions because we will let the listeners figure out what they want to figure out, you know, and we'll show the market what we do together later when we are ready.

But what do you think, because it's open source, are you not concerned? Are you excited? Like, how do you see that dynamic going on? Like, people can see what you're doing with this product and adopt it widely and change the APC. Is this concerning to you? Is this exciting? Like, how do you see the future of that evolving?

Because you're making the APC PLC a reality, finally. And thank you for it, by the way. 

Fabio: No, honestly, I'm not worried and I'm a big enthusiast about the open source aspect because, you know, many eyes will look at the code, they will fix bugs and security, et cetera, and the customer that really appreciate will value the quality that we are bringing for the money we are charging.

That is low. Of course, it's higher than the Chinese or whatever Clones that we may see on the market, but the quality of the products we have is very, very high and people really appreciate it. Just to give you an example, during COVID, we had the University of Oxford using Arduino original boards. They bought several thousand Arduino boards to do the ventilators because of course, when you have the life of patients attached to a machine, so you need to have people.

So I think there are other attributes that the customer will evaluate, but I think the open nature of the platform is really important. It's important because you can spot improvement areas. You can understand because there is always in our vision and mission, the idea of letting people understand how things are done.

So you can buy like a book. Blackbox and it works, but if you know how it works, it will be better for you. You can tweak it so you can understand the limits, you can go over the limits. So this is the level of importance we give to open source. 

Natan: It's funny you use this thing, black box, because sometimes I'm like a broken record to the dismay of many people I work with, but like, you know, you say the black box is kind of like the inhibitor of innovation.

You know, people are sometimes afraid of transparency, but actually this is the thing, if everything's out in the light and you know how to make it better, you know, whether you play the open source game, yes or no, it's a different story, that's, I guess, sometimes a business decision or ideological decision, doesn't matter, but definitely if more is in the open, innovation can move much faster.

Fabio: No, absolutely. So what we did, especially on the industrial ways, of course, the software is all open and is going to be always all open. What we saw is that, for example, sharing the Gerber files for, like, complex multi layer boards is something that does provide any, any innovation. So basically share the schematics, et cetera.

So we changed a little bit the model for the ProSpace, but again, the transparency. of this product is very, very important. And moving forward, we are going to do the same more and more. Just for example, a mega cloud vendor told us, we love your products for the environmental monitoring of our data center, because basically we know exactly what is inside.

So we know the chips, we know the software that is running on your devices. You 

Natan: can 

Fabio: trust it. It's like x ray. So you can see it. And if we put whatever box, even from like a known vendor, or like one of these vendors have been on the market for 30 years. We don't know what is inside. It could be whatever chip they want and the version by version this can change where for you it's like totally transparent.

So it's on the website. Go there, right click on the link and see what is inside. 

Natan: That's amazing. Fabio, it's super exciting to see this and we're going to share some links on some of the open source communities and the products that people can see and understand. One of my main takeaways. is that if we believe the trajectory of what happened from the maker, hobbyist, educators to continue, then you're ushering an era of bringing APC, the application programmable controller, to scale.

And that's super important and it's great to see you guys doing that. So I appreciate you and the company doing that. 

Fabio: No, absolutely. And we have upcoming innovation, especially in the area of the core platform. So just a hint for the future. So we're working on that. The Zephyr operating system. So there will be a big announcement in September.

Over time frame, we are already part of the Zephyr community, but I just saw some of the demonstration and the portability of code. The peer achieving is going to be revolutionizing this area. It's like more or less what you saw when you saw the first Arduino. It's going to be the next big. So Fabio, if you 

Natan: allow me, on both of our behalf, this is also a call to action to all those factory hackers out there.

To all the people who are doing this, whether you work in a big company or a small company, let us know what you want. Both Fabio and I are listening. We want to know what to build and we want to know how to support these communities to build the right thing. And again, I want to thank you so much for coming, Fabio.

What comes next we see soon and, uh, we'll definitely need to do another episode. So great to have you on the show. Thank you. 

Fabio: It was a pleasure. I think this is one of the best interviews because you know exactly what we're talking about, you know, coming from MIT and working in this sector, it is not easy.

So thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Fantastic interview. 

Natan: Absolutely. Fabio. Thank you very much. 

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Augmented Ops podcast from Tulip Interfaces. We hope you found this week's episode informative and inspiring. You can find the show on LinkedIn and YouTube or at tulip. co slash podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating or review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts until next time.