The launch of the Arduino UNO R4 marks a huge leap forward for our community. For us, it’s also the chance to celebrate the people who bring our ecosystem to life with their bright ideas, radiant enthusiasm, and shining insight.
That is how the UNO R4 Stars blog post series began: to highlight makers who have not only created amazing projects with Arduino, but who are giving back to the community by sharing as they go and helping others make anything they wish.
We invite you to discover each profile, hoping you might find a North Star to navigate around an expanding galaxy or venture into completely new universes.
Daniel Jansson first came into contact with Arduino in 2011, while at Umeå Institute of Design for his master’s degree in interaction design. The experience was empowering to the point of being weird: “It was like, now I can create things which only engineers and developers could make before. It felt like I was doing things that I should just not be able to do.”
Curious by nature, he instantly realized that – while the technology could have helped him in his studies – it was a lot more fun to create quirky interactive objects that made people smile. So he kept going, experimenting with various Arduino boards to create big and small devices with connectivity, sound, lights and interactivity.
“There are few things I enjoy more than taking disparate subjects and joining them into new creations, oftentimes with Arduino acting as the glue to help things sense the world around them, or interact in new and unusual ways,” he says.
A great example of this is his favorite maker project: the YouTube Subscriber Levelometer, which repurposes a device once used to measure the level of liquid in tanks using pressure. Adding his signature blend of “physical interaction, programming, sound, connectivity and a healthy dose of humor,” Jansson built a phygital system that keeps track of his key influencer stats. He integrated speech synthesis by combining an Arduino Nano with the Talkie library, which was based on work done by Texas Instruments in the 1980s, and programmed everything via the Arduino IDE.
