@Heart with Atmel-powered Arduinos

Arduino has officially kicked off its @Heart initiative. According to company rep Zoe Romano, the program “allows Arduino to build strong partnerships with products and people we appreciate, [while] bringing forward these relationships [and] communicating them clearly with a symbol visible to a broader audience.”

As Romano notes, numerous companies and individual Makers create products based on Arduino tech and would like to be clearly identified as supporters of the versatile platform.

“Arduino@Heart allows them to show they are part of the Arduino ecosystem while receiving support and recognition from Arduino,” Romano explained. “Arduino@Heart is a relationship of mutual help: Arduino supports makers and companies with visibility; at the same time, interesting products show how Arduino can be used in cool sustainable ways.”

Arduino@Heart is available for any product supported by the Arduino Development environment and currently including the following Atmel microcontrollers (MCUs):

• ATMega328 clocked at 8 or 16 MHz
• ATMega1280 clocked at 16 MHz
• ATMega2560 clocked at 16 MHz
• ATMega32U4 clocked at 16MHz
• SAM3X

Unsupsirisngly, a number of companies have already endorsed the @Heart initiative, including littleBits Electronics, Smart Citizen, Bare Conductive, Aesthetec Studio, primo.io and EarthMake.

“littleBits is thrilled to be a part of the new Arduino@Heart program. An Arduino littleBits module has been a popular request for quite a while and we are huge fans of the Arduino ecosystem and community,” said Ayah Bdeir, the founder/CEO of littleBits Electronics Inc.

“The littleBits Arduino module will simultaneously increase the power of the littleBits library by adding programming capabilities and make the Arduino environment easier to get involved in by eliminating the need for soldering or wiring. We can’t wait to see what people with make with it!”

Filippo Yacob and Matteo Loglio of primo.io limited expressed similar sentiments.

“As a Maker-centric company, we mostly concentrate on ideating and developing products; we believe that this partnership could give us much more visibility through marketing and advertising,” the duo explained.

“Moreover, from our point of view being part of the Arduino@Heart program would increase the visibility in the community and being recognized as ‘Arduino approved’ would stimulate us to improve our processes and products to a quality level that would match the Arduino brand. As a consequence, this makes our product more accessible and user friendly to a community that is already familiar with the technology.”

Interested in learning more? You can check out the official Arduino@Heart page here.