Chrome books should come with Arduino 1.0 installed and come with an Arduino

Pt 327

Google’s Chromebooks should come with Arduino 1.0 installed and come with an Arduino. We’d like to see this happen for the OLPC as well, last night a show-and-tell presenter was sharing a lot of sensor hardware work for OLPCs he was working on and it occurred to us that there are a few ways to get more Arduinos out there being used for a variety of uses.

Wouldn’t it be great to get (or give) a computer set up with Arduino 1.0, an Arduino, processing, some gEDA/kiCAD/blender/inkscape + fritzing?


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8 Comments

  1. i totally agree.

  2. And Fritzing.

  3. I totally agree with #1 & #2 above!

  4. Er… I strongly disagree with this. Pre-installed software is just plain evil & wrong. A computer has limited hard drive space so why should anyone but the owner decide what is installed on it?

    Every Windoze OEM tosses on all sorts of junk that I end up having to spend a good amount of time removing. Why should Google Chrome follow that same annoying trait?

    Keep the machine lean and mean and allow people to make their own choice. Don’t make the choice for them. That is so annoying.

    I believe that exposure to Arduino programming is a great idea, you have no quarrel with me there. But pre-installing it… just say no.

  5. Definitely! I liked that OLPC sensor system yesterday. Maybe thats a great way to use the one I have… and get our local firmware guru (who wrote the OLPC firmware) involved!
    It would be cool to see MiniBloq and/or other visual programming tool on there as well for the less text savy (young) programmers. They just announced/released the SparkFun Inventor kit version – 7 experiments from ARDx with code, docs etc. Yes it would work with the Adafruit version of ARDx too.

    Bundling arduino with Chrome or OLPC should include packaging (vs naked board) and some parts for ARDx experiments…. Oooo maybe the Fredboard. Thats my new fave experimenter board!

  6. Agree with Denbo: motivation is pure, but the ways are questionable. Could be issue of phrasing: you mean to have the option of giving someone a chrome book + arduino with software? Is 1.0 compatible? If so, why pre-install if easy to do it yourself for someone else?

  7. http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=61652.0

    part of the problem is lack of any support for native apps in the ChromeOS. It’d be quite an undertaking to port Arduino from Java to an HTML5 interface, especially for USB connectivity. OLPC sounds more reasonable.

    Furthermore, Chromebooks are being marketed for people who only want to use the web for basic computing such as the elderly. No disrespect but that doesn’t look to be Arduino’s demographic.

  8. This is a great idea. An OLPC/Arduino package would be fun.

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