Arduino Celebrates Major Milestones with Its Open Source Report 2024

The Arduino team has published its latest annual open source report, for 2024 — celebrating a year that has seen it begin the move to the Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS) and the continued development of the Arduino Lab for MicroPython.

"The Arduino name designates a company, an open source project, a community," the Arduino team writes in the introduction to its latest annual report. "We're tens of millions of people sharing a passion for embedded electronics. But we're also thousands of companies manufacturing boards, shields, and accessories, and developing software for them. We're educators, students, hackers, consultants, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs. In these 18 years we have all been collaborating every day to share knowledge and solutions, building an incredibly vast amount of resources around which an entire industry has grown. As Arduino company, we believe in the values that make this community great: openness, transparency, collaboration, sharing."

The Arduino Open Source Report 2024, to give the document its full title, comes as the company closes the doors on a busy year — a year that saw it forced to move away from Arm's now-discontinued Mbed platform to the Zephyr real-time operating system (RTOS). While the move was forced, it appears to have been beneficial: Arduino's work, which resulted in the beta release of its first Zephyr-based core in December last year, has seen it submit a total of 114 patches to the upstream project across 2024.

The company has also highlighted the release of no fewer than seven open-hardware board designs, though none of which were standalone microcontrollers: the Modulino Movement, Distance, Thermo, Knob, Buzzer, Pixels, and Buttons boards, designed as plug-and-play peripherals for the company's Plug and Make Kit.

The report also looks into Arduino's software ecosystem, highlighting improvements made in five updates to the next-generation Arduino IDE 2 integrated development environment, the milestone 1.0.0 release of the Arduino CLI command-line interface tool, and the release of three versions of Arduino Lab for MicroPython — the company's in-house development environment for boards supporting MicroPython as an alternative to its traditional C-based Wiring language — including a cloud-based version. The company has also celebrated 11 new versions of the Arduino Cloud CLI and 17 of the Arduino Cloud Agent, plus the release of 19 new official libraries including those targeting cellular connectivity, the Modulino modules in both C and MicroPython variants, and low-power projects on the Portenta H7 and Portenta C33 boards.

Arduino is more than the company, though, and in the report's community update signs point to a healthy ecosystem: the number of new third-party libraries has grown 18 percent year-on-year to 1,198, bringing the total to 7,669, while 368 new tutorials were added to the Arduino Project Hub — an 80 percent increase over the number added in 2023, the company says.

"The Arduino community is much more than this, and given its size it is nearly impossible to track all the contributions that are shared daily in unofficial community platforms and independent websites," the Arduino team notes. "This includes software contributions such as code examples and full open-source sketches, but also knowledge contributions such as documentation and tutorials, and last but not least hardware design contributions such as derivative or complementary products (shields, accessories, derived boards)."

The full report is now available to download from the Arduino blog.