Wiring is a development platform created by Hernando Barragán, as part of his thesis project in 2003. It was created and documented with artists, designers and experts in mind. It was based on the original work done on Processing project in MIT.
Wiring and Processing have spawned another project, Arduino, which uses the Processing IDE, with a simplified version of the C++ language, as a way to teach artists and designers how to program microcontrollers. There are now two separate hardware projects, Wiring and Arduino, using the Wiring environment and language.
While Wiring focuses on the Wiring framework, with a mission to have it on as many microcontrollers as possible, Arduino mainly uses Atmel controllers (and Intel recently) to make affordable hardware.
Back in October 2011, a discussion at the Wiring Forum brought up the question, “I was just wondering, given that Arduino got so much traction and Wiring (while its source) does not appear so crowded, why don’t you just join forces? Anything personal?.”
An administrator at the forum, Brett, who was representing the wiring team, responded claiming that they have contacted Arduino for the same but never received a response.
It would be great if more people would ask the question to the Arduino guys, and not us! We are totally ready, willing, and able to work on the software with them/for them. It’s just a matter of convincing them!
— Brett “BHagman”, admin @ Wiring
The folk at Hackaday, also clarify the other questions that readers might have — was it legal? “Arduino was basically a fork of the Wiring software, re-branded and running on a physical platform that borrowed a lot from the Wiring boards. Whether or not this is legal or even moral is not an issue — Wiring was developed fully open-source, both software and hardware, so it was Massimo Banzi’s to copy as much as anyone else’s. But given that Arduino started off as essentially a re-branded Wiring (with code ported to a trivially different microcontroller), you’d be forgiven for thinking that somewhat more acknowledgement than “derives from Wiring” was appropriate,” explains the Hackaday post.
Source Hernando Barragán
