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[on:]

Hey guys ,

my name is Niklas . I am studying engeenering at the University of Kassel (Germany).
Now I want to write a dissertation about „ Open Source Manufacturing “. While exploring the internet for some open source hardware projects and some good hints given by my professor , I found the Adruino
To me it is great. I hope you go on and get more and more successful.
At least I got a few questions about your Project , i would be very thankful, if you could answer them.

1. How much Arduinos were sold per year / month ?

2. How do they get the project known ? (advertising)

3. Do they get faster into the market because of open source ?

4. The Arduino group produces the Arduino, do they give a guaranty ?

5. The Arduino project started as a „closed“ project (you developed the first boards of your own) later it was made „open“ (the community was invented to improve the board), why didn't they started it open ?
   

Thank you for reading, I would be very happy to get your answer soon .

Kind regards,

Niklas

[Reply #1 on:]

A lot of answers appear here, and in other recordings of the team's presentations at last year's "open hardware" summit: http://arduino.cc/blog/2011/09/16/arduino-confidential-open-hardware-summit/

I don't think that Arduino was ever "Closed"; initial versions were based on Wiring, another open-source project.  The exact meaning of Open Source, particularly as it applies to hardware, has become more solidly defined, and there were occasional glitches in openness...

[Reply #2 on:]

Check - http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?action=stats - for interesting facts and figures.

1. How much Arduinos were sold per year / month ?

This board has had ~65000 unique registered members.
The site has often 4x as much guests as members logged in.

So there are 250.000 Arduino users in the world. (yes, you have lies, damned lies and statistics

Lets assume they use on average 2.5 Arduino's per year, some will have only 1, others use 10 per year.
That gives 600.000 Arduino's per year, ==> 50.000 per month.


2. How do they get the project known ? (advertising)

Yes.


3. Do they get faster into the market because of open source ?

Dont know, not all people are charmed by open source, but many are. Germany is a country with a very high OS factor, while the other countries this is less.
You could do a search on linux demographics, think that has been investigated. That would give some sort of measuring stick/indication how many people like OS.


4. The Arduino group produces the Arduino, do they give a guaranty ?

Don't know.
But they guarantee that they do their uttermost best as they all have Arduino as middle name. If they produce bad stuff all the users of Arduino will point to them.
Please be aware that most anonymous engineers at most big companies can produce crap without the world knowing their name.

5. The Arduino project started as a „closed“ project (you developed the first boards of your own) later it was made „open“ (the community was invented to improve the board), why didn't they started it open ?

Don't know if it was ever closed, but still that is just a business model decission, I think it is a sign of the time, read the book open innovation of Chesbrough. Many projects have gone open and created a crowd around them. Many failed and some succeeded, and tomorrow the world will be different agian

Please post your final report on this forum,

(All above is just my honest opinion / best guess, not an academic source)

[Reply #3 on:]

1. How much Arduinos were sold per year / month ?

Not sure Arduino publishes such information but you could always contact them and ask. However that
would only give you one data point as the 'arduino' world also has a very large number of independent arduino clone and arduino compatible manufactures whose volume probably in total far surpasses the 'official arduino' production numbers.

2. How do they get the project known ? (advertising)

I suspect it really started with word of mouth via the Internet and grew from there. I don't think manufacturing for the general hobbyist population was an original intent, but rather something they could make that their 'artist' students could purchase and use in their course creations.

3. Do they get faster into the market because of open source ?

Certainly on the software side they were able to leverage a lot from the existing projects including Processing, Wiring, gcc C/C++, AVR library, AVRDUDE, etc. They really didn't have to develop all that much code from scratch but rather just the Java glue stuff to bring it all together within the IDE. The hardware development shouldn't have taken much time as the basic board design was very simplistic. Only their creative shield pin spacing was unique to the microcontroller world. 

4. The Arduino group produces the Arduino, do they give a guaranty ?

I believe they do have a short warranty period, but not sure. The board is simple enough that manufacturing faults are probably a very small percentage of production and not a high cost for them.


5. The Arduino project started as a „closed“ project (you developed the first boards of your own) later it was made „open“ (the community was invented to improve the board), why didn't they started it open ?

Well on the software side it was always open as they utilized so much code from other open source projects. The hardware side I don't know. As I said I don't think they started the project with the idea of marketing to the world, but rather just as a software/hardware platform to support their students. Open source hardware was/is a pretty new concept so it's not like they followed an existing model in how they wanted to proceed with the 'opening up' of their hardware design.

Lefty