#726 – Arduino’s Invisible Touch with Massimo Banzi

Welcome, Massimo Banzi of SuperModerno and co-founder of Arduino

• Introduction and SuperModerno: Massimo introduces himself as a “friendly nerd” and discusses his new project, SuperModerno
• The project aims to explain the “behind the scenes” of technology to prevent people from becoming “slaves to the platform”
• The History of Technology: Massimo expresses his passion for technology’s history, emphasizing non-American innovators to show Europeans they can also lead in technology, citing the UK-based origins of the Arm processor
• The Legacy of Olivetti: He highlights Olivetti (founded in 1908), which moved from typewriters to creating the Programma 101, the first desktop computer used by NASA to compute orbits for the Apollo program
• Design as a Differentiator: Olivetti was the first tech company to apply design to everything (products, posters, and architecture)
• This inspired Massimo’s concept of the “invisible touch”, the idea that consistent, intentional design creates a unique connection with users and gives a company a competitive edge
• The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII): Massimo’s path led him to IDII, located in the former Olivetti research building, where he transitioned from a two-week sabbatical to a four-year stay
• Learning by Making: To help students with no electronics background, Massimo drew on how he learned as a seven-year-old (“learning by making”) to remove the friction of interacting with technology
• The Founding Team: He met Tom Igoe (ITP) and David Cuartielles, and they realized students were afraid to be creative because they feared “blowing up” expensive tools like the Basic Stamp
• The “Pizza and a Beer” Price Point: Massimo aimed for a hardware cost of 20 Euros, roughly what a student would spend on a pizza and a beer, to encourage experimentation
• Building the Platform: Along with David Mellis, the team adapted Processing (a language for artists) by “surgically” replacing Java with C++ to create the Arduino IDE
• Ivrea Manufacturing: Leveraging the industrial base of Ivrea and Torino (the “Detroit of Italy”), Massimo was able to find local PCB manufacturers and assemblers just a short drive away
• From Hacking to AVR: Massimo’s early work involved hacking satellite TV PIC chips for soccer fans, but mentor Bill Verplank encouraged him to use AVR microcontrollers because they could be programmed simply in C
• Enabling Creators: Massimo shares stories of how Arduino enabled others, such as Josef Prusa, who started with Arduino as a teenager before building his global open-source 3D printer company
• The Innovation of Simplicity: Massimo argues that Arduino’s true innovation is the user experience
• This is measured by the “Time to First Blink”, the goal for a user to go from downloading software to blinking an LED in five minutes
• Standardization and “The Core”: Arduino became an ad-hoc standard by providing a compatibility layer across different microcontrollers
• Massimo believes in having a “small slice of a really large pie” by allowing other architectures to work within the ecosystem
• Hardware Architecture and the “Lasagna”: Inspired by the PC104 format, the board uses a layered approach where modules stack like a lasagna
• The “Shield of a King”: The name Arduino comes from King Arduino of Ivrea; David Cuartielles suggested that since the board was named after a king, the add-on modules should be called “Shields”
• Hardware Design Choices: The board fits a credit card size (to stay within the free version of Eagle software) and is blue because that color was thought to be less tiring for workers’ eyes
• Happy Accidents: The unique shape was chosen to be “ourselves instead of everyone else”
• During the design process, Massimo inadvertently moved a connector by half a step, creating an offset header that they kept for consistency after the first few thousand were made
• The Discovery of Auto-Reset: During a workshop in Germany, Massimo solved the frustration of manual resets by soldering a capacitor to the DTR pin, allowing the software to trigger the reset automatically
• The US Market and Legal Battles: Tom Igoe’s adoption of Arduino at NYU helped the US become the project’s single biggest market
• This growth led to a difficult legal battle for control of the brand against a former partner
• Support from Arm: Massimo credits Arm Ltd (and CEO Simon Segars) for providing the strategic support that allowed the founders to regain control of the company. Massimo believes this is the first time he has talked about the role of Arm in the difficult legal process.
• Industrial and AI Expansion: Partnerships with Intel and Microsoft (Windows 10 IoT) led to early forays into TinyML (AI on small boards) back in 2017
• The Qualcomm Acquisition: In October 2025, Qualcomm acquired Arduino, which Massimo sees as essential for bringing “advanced silicon” into the family to handle the increasing complexity of technology
• The “Arduino Formula” and Layering: Massimo views Arduino as a formula for simplification that can be applied to anything, including complex Linux machines like the Uno Q
• This is achieved by building in layers, where beginners use high-level abstractions and experts can “strip away” layers to reach the bare metal
• The Future Vision: Massimo looks forward to the “Arduino Formula” being applied to new fields, stating he is waiting for someone to develop an “Arduino for biology” using CRISPR and DNA technology