Arduino Community Bangladesh – From Blinking LEDs to Building an EdTech Ecosystem

Executive Summary

What starts as a small student curiosity often ends up shaping an entire career. This is the story of Arduino Community Bangladesh (ACB)—a grassroots initiative started in 2016 by two undergraduates at the University of Rajshahi that evolved into a published legacy and laid the foundation for Tinkers Technologies Ltd.

From the first blinking LED in a campus robotics lab to organizing Arduino Day for the entire country, writing Bengali-language books, and eventually building an EdTech startup, ACB became a sandbox for learning by doing. This case study traces that journey across five phases: genesis, challenge, execution, scale, and evolution.

1. The Genesis: “Arduino! The word felt like magic.”

Timeline: 2015–2016 • Location: Department of CSE, University of Rajshahi

Early experiments inside the Robotics Lab that ignited the journey.

Back in 2015, the word “Arduino” felt a bit clumsy on our tongues, yet it carried a strange magnetic pull. Munem Shahriar and I were fresh undergraduates in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Rajshahi, experiencing a familiar pattern in Bangladesh: students enter CSE under social or parental pressure, only to be hit by a wave of frustration and impostor syndrome when the abstractions of programming don’t “click.”

We were no different. We weren’t prodigy coders. We were just two confused students trying to find joy in syntax and logic that felt disconnected from our everyday reality.

The turning point came when we met our seniors from the 2012–13 session—Sohel bhai and his team—inside the Robotics Lab. They handed us an Arduino board.

For the first time, code wasn’t just text on a black terminal. It was action.

• We wrote a few lines of C++.
• A light blinked.
• A motor spun.

That tiny LED blink did something our entire first year of coursework hadn’t: it connected logic to reality. We realized that while C programming feels abstract on its own, Arduino makes it tangible. If we had been exposed to this in school, our learning curve—and perhaps our confidence—would have looked very different.

2. The Challenge: Breaking the Silos

As we spent more time in the Robotics Lab, a pattern emerged. There were brilliant hobbyists and tinkerers everywhere—at Rajshahi University, RUET, Varendra University, BAUET, and beyond. But everyone was working in isolation. Each campus had its own pockets of enthusiasm, but no shared platform, no cross-pollination, no community of practice.

We asked ourselves a simple question that changed everything:
What if we brought everyone under one umbrella?

That question became the seed of Arduino Community Bangladesh (ACB)—not as a formal, registered entity at first, but as a shared identity for people who believed in learning electronics and programming through hands-on making.

3. The Execution: Arduino Day 2017

The Risk

In 2017, we were just second-year undergraduates—no formal event management experience, no sponsorship network, and no “brand” behind us. On the official Arduino website, we noticed something interesting: “Arduino Day” was being celebrated at 500+ venues worldwide, but Bangladesh had zero.

That empty map felt like a challenge and an opportunity at the same time.

The Action

With the audacity that only undergraduates seem to have, we applied to Arduino Headquarters to host an official Arduino Day event in Bangladesh. We expected to be ignored.

They approved it.

What followed was a crash course in entrepreneurship and community organizing. With almost no budget, our “office” became the corridors of the CSE Department at Rajshahi University. We designed posters, begged for permission, rearranged class schedules, borrowed equipment, and sent invitations across campuses.

The Outcome

Arduino Day 2017 turned the department corridors into a makerspace festival. Students from RUET, Varendra University, BAUET, and other institutions showed up with their own projects, curiosity, and stories.

For us, it was a powerful lesson: when you take a genuine initiative, your community—and sometimes the universe—conspires to help you. What started as “two little kids” from 2nd year trying to host a global event became a national signal: Bangladesh had joined the Arduino map.

4. Scaling Impact: Writing in Our Own Language

Timeline: 2017–2018

Organizing events exposed another gap in the ecosystem: the lack of high-quality Bengali learning materials. Students were excited during workshops but often got stuck when they tried to continue at home. Most documentation, tutorials, and example projects were in English, creating yet another barrier on top of technical difficulty.

Sitting in the lab one day, we asked: What if we wrote the book we wish we had?

Book 1: “Arduino te Hatekhori”

During the Ramadan vacation of 2017, Munem and I locked ourselves into a writing routine. The goal was simple: create a beginner-friendly Arduino book in Bengali that doesn’t just dump code, but tells a story and builds confidence. That manuscript became “Arduino te Hatekhori” (Introduction to Arduino).

We were unknown undergraduates, so getting it published felt like a fantasy. This is where mentorship changed everything. We connected with Munir Hasan sir from BdOSN. He read the manuscript, believed in it, and championed it.

Thanks to his support, “Arduino te Hatekhori” was published by Adarsha at the Ekushey Boi Mela 2018. Seeing students, school kids, and teachers pick up a book we wrote was surreal.

Book 2: “Hoye Otho Ekjon Problem Solver”

The response to the first book made one thing clear: the community was hungry, not just for tools, but for problem-solving mindsets. Over the next eight months, we worked on a second book: “Hoye Otho Ekjon Problem Solver” (Become a Problem Solver).

This book went beyond simple circuits. It focused on IoT, systems thinking, and advanced problem-solving—helping readers move from “following tutorials” to designing their own solutions. In many ways, this was our first attempt at scalable pedagogy: taking what we learned from workshops and turning it into a reusable, self-paced learning experience.

5. The Evolution: From Community to Industry (2019 – Present)

Communities often fade when their founders graduate. Arduino Community Bangladesh didn’t disappear—it evolved.

From ACB to Tinkers Technologies Ltd.

The spirit of ACB—the belief that hands-on making can change how people learn—slowly matured into a more formal structure. That structure became Tinkers Technologies Ltd.

As a co-founder of Tinkers Technologies, I now work with a team building products like AmarVasha, aiming to make education accessible, localized, and playful. The DNA is the same as our early Arduino days: use technology as a human-centered tool, not an end in itself.

Academic Growth: From LED to HCI

That first blinking LED did more than spark a hobby; it quietly redirected my academic trajectory. The questions that began with “How do we teach Arduino better?” expanded into:

• How do people learn complex technical concepts?
• How can interfaces support curiosity instead of punishing mistakes?
• How can local language and culture be embedded in learning tools?

Today, I am pursuing my PhD in Engineering at Marshall University, USA, focusing on Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). The same themes from ACB—access, agency, and learning through making—now show up in my research on human-centered AI, tools for thought, and educational interfaces.

Conclusion

Looking back from 2025, Arduino Community Bangladesh was far more than a student club. It was our sandbox—a place where we were allowed to be beginners, to break things, to burn components, to run bad events before we ran good ones, and to slowly discover who we were as engineers and educators.

The most important lesson wasn’t about hardware or code. It was this:

You don’t need to be an expert to start. You just need to be genuinely curious—and willing to do the work in public.

To the students reading this today: start small.

• Write that first “Hello, World!” for a microcontroller.
• Burn a few components while experimenting.
• Organize that tiny meetup in your department corridor.

You have no idea how these tiny actions will compound. One day, you might look back and realize that a simple blinking LED was the first domino in a chain that led to books, startups, research, and a lifetime of impact.

References & Media

• Prothom Alo Feature: আয়োজনে নিয়ে Arduino – Prothom Alo
• Books: “Arduino te Hatekhori” & “Hoye Otho Ekjon Problem Solver” (Adarsha).
• Website (Archived): www.arduinocommunity.org.bd