Davide Gomba —

Arduino has a little (yet effective) bit in Turin, and that’s Officine Arduino. We opened this place two years ago to offer a shelter to the Arduinians in northern Italy and host a makerspace, for their creations. We witnessed (and joined) the foundation of the Torino Fablab, an association offering the very same machines to anybody interested about the maker movement in Turin. On top of that, the all ardu-maker-fab-co-creative space is hosted in Toolbox Coworking.

It’s tough to weight all the efforts and failures and successes we reached in these two years. We’ve seen the birth of Verkstad Arduino, the Swedish Arduino Office which is sharing the same principles we’ve been looking for in conceiving this place: mixing the company approach and the horizontal, informal one of makerspaces and coworking spaces (aka collaboration spaces).

I love the way Arduino Team dealt with the growing of the project: create different little places rather than having a huge one.

On top of that, Officine Arduino wouldn’t have been so without the help of Smartprojects (one of the main producers of Arduino). A selfless and generous helping hand towards us and towards italian makers in general. They lended us their lasercutter for 2 years, now that we are setted up they are going to lend the very same lasercut to another newborn fablab! This is the picture I took when I broght the lasercut back last week.

Last year we celebrated our birthday with Josef Prusa and the building of ten reprap 3d printers. This year we want to dedicate our birthday to education, so we are going to host and build Interactive digital writeboards during the week end, following the Wiildos opensource project, with Pietro Pilolli (project host with Matteo Ruffoni e Massimo Bosetti).

Friday is important for yet another reason: Toolbox is going to host the press conference of the newborn italian maker association, inwhich Massimo plays the role of president: Make in Italy Cdb Onlus. If you are a journalist or maker you can enroll here to join the press conference.

tl;dr: we are partying this upcoming friday, if you pass by let us know, FB Event. Interested in building your own Interactive Open Source Digital Writeboard? Join the Make In Italy Cdb Onlus Press conference here.