Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats, and motion detectors.

In 2004, Hernando Barragán created the development platform Wiring as a Master's thesis project at IDII, under the supervision of Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas.

[citation needed] At the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino's company, Smart Projects, registered the Arduino trademark in Italy and kept this a secret from the other co-founders for about two years.

Negotiations with Martino and his firm to bring the trademark under the control of the original Arduino company failed.

They then appointed a new CEO, Federico Musto, who renamed the company Arduino SRL and created the website arduino.org, copying the graphics and layout of the original arduino.cc.

[12] In May 2015, Arduino LLC created the worldwide trademark Genuino, used as brand name outside the United States.

[18] The controversy surrounding Musto continued when, in July 2017, he reportedly pulled many open source licenses, schematics, and code from the Arduino website, prompting scrutiny and outcry.

Fabio Violante is the new CEO replacing Federico Musto, who no longer works for Arduino AG.

In August 2018, Arduino announced its new open source command line tool (arduino-cli), which can be used as a replacement of the IDE to program the boards from a shell.

[23] In February 2019, Arduino announced its IoT Cloud service as an extension of the Create online environment.

The hardware reference designs are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and are available on the Arduino website.

Although the hardware and software designs are freely available under copyleft licenses, the developers have requested the name Arduino to be exclusive to the official product and not be used for derived works without permission.

[27] Most Arduino boards consist of an Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller (ATmega8,[29] ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, or ATmega2560) with varying amounts of flash memory, pins, and features.

[31] The boards use single or double-row pins or female headers that facilitate connections for programming and incorporation into other circuits.

Some designs, such as the LilyPad,[32] run at 8 MHz and dispense with the onboard voltage regulator due to specific form factor restrictions.

Arduino microcontrollers are pre-programmed with a bootloader that simplifies the uploading of programs to the on-chip flash memory.

Current Arduino boards are programmed via Universal Serial Bus (USB), implemented using USB-to-serial adapter chips such as the FTDI FT232.

Other variants, such as the Arduino Mini and the unofficial Boarduino, use a detachable USB-to-serial adapter board or cable, Bluetooth or other methods.

Many enhance the basic Arduino by adding output drivers, often for use in school-level education,[36] to simplify making buggies and small robots.

[55] Shields can provide motor controls for 3D printing and other applications, GNSS (satellite navigation), Ethernet, liquid crystal display (LCD), or breadboarding (prototyping).

It includes a code editor with features such as text cutting and pasting, searching and replacing text, automatic indenting, brace matching, and syntax highlighting, and provides simple one-click mechanisms to compile and upload programs to an Arduino board.

It also contains a message area, a text console, a toolbar with buttons for common functions and a hierarchy of operation menus.

The Arduino IDE supplies a software library from the Wiring project, which provides many common input and output procedures.

[66] The system still uses Arduino CLI (Command Line Interface), but improvements include a more professional development environment and autocompletion support.

This program uses the functions pinMode(), digitalWrite(), and delay(), which are provided by the internal libraries included in the IDE environment.

The Arduino project received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category at the 2006 Prix Ars Electronica.