Arduino's Latest Open Source Report Highlights Major Growth, Community Contributions

Arduino has released its retrospective report into its open source ecosystem over the year just gone — dubbed, clearly enough, the 2021 Arduino Open Source Report.

"We're proud of the many achievements we celebrated in 2021. It was one of the busiest and most productive years in Arduino's history of commitment to open source," says Arduino's Alessandro Ranellucci of the retrospective. "We launched a number of new open source hardware products, software tools and libraries. We also upgraded existing assets, heavily refactoring some core pillars of the Arduino framework (IDE, library index and more), making them robust enough to support the growing Arduino user base."

The report isn't just about what the Arduino team itself achieved over the last year, though: There's a look at the community as well, which is always a key part of any successful open source project. "We're grateful for all the active maintainers and contributors that put Arduino in a league of its own," says Ranellucci, "and strive to give everyone proper credit."

The report isn't just about what the Arduino team itself achieved over the last year, though: There's a look at the community as well, which is always a key part of any successful opensource project. "We're grateful for all the active maintainers and contributors that put Arduino in a league of its own," says Ranellucci, "and strive to give everyone proper credit."

"Open source and commercial usage are good friends," the report claims, "and growing a business-oriented ecosystem of players is one of the goals of the Arduino project," the report explains, "but this shall not be detrimental to the sustainability of the project itself: When open source hardware and open source software are tightly coupled, counterfeiters benefit from unfair competition as the development of the software stack and all the costs related to growing the ecosystem (including community, advocacy, support and brand awareness) are only borne upon the shoulders of the original organization and the other active contributors."

For Arduino team activities, the report highlights the releases of the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier, Nano Motor Carrier, the Nano RP2040 Connect, and the UNO Mini Limited Edition — a teeny-tiny recreation of the ever-popular Microchip ATmega328-based full-size Arduino UNO — along with the Arduino IDE 2.0 reaching release candidate status, the new Arduino Lint command-line tool, the Arduino Language Server, and a web-based Arduino Library directory.

The community section of the report, meanwhile, boasts of a 25 percent growth year-on-year in total published libraries, 6,005 new library releases, 326 new tutorials in the Arduino Project Hub, 113 new versions of contributed Arduino cores, and a range of other contributions including: "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 for download from the Arduino website.