What is Arduino?

Let us discuss what is an Arduino board and what are its features?

What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open source developmental board with an ATMega microcontroller chip which can be easily programmed (using IDE) multiple times for any required project. An Arduino UNO developmental board is shown in picture below.

Popular Arduino UNO board

Arduino UNO is most widely used Arduino board for beginners projects (but after practice more advanced products acn be developed using Arduino. (Arduino Mini, Nano, Mega, Yun, Leonardo, LilyPad etc. are some other boards of Arduino family). The boards of family of Arduino has a logo on it which is shown below.

Features of Arduino are: low cost, updated libraries, easy programming, easy connection, thousands of online learning resources, a large family of compatible modules and sensors.

Why Arduino?

•Any student can implement his/her ideas by using a logic (with programming) and then making a hardware arrangement that work on that logic ( Arduino + sensors).

•But this is not possible if doing so is high in cost.

•Arduino UNO is very easily available and is fairly cheap. Also its online tutorials can be used to implement our project idea in reality. The tutorial with connection diagrams (as shown below) are available for various projects on internet.

Programming an Arduino!!

•Arduino is programmed by ARDUINO IDE which uses language similar to C/C++.

•Little or no programming skills: Not a problem. You can easily get basic to complex program examples/ tutorials on internet and by modifying these programs you can enhance programming skills too. Yellow highlighted lines describe the Arduino Blink program and the commands are shown within red box in picture below. Each command is provided with text to describe its working. So we can easily understand step by step the execution of program.

Until you damage the micro-controller chip by mistake, you can program Arduino board for different projects as many times as you want.

"One Arduino board for Multiple projects"

At Last!!

Don't wait for the right time, use the present time in right way. If you want to make your micro-controller based project or see how programming interacts with hardware, get an Arduino Board (preferably UNO) and start exploring. (there are many sensors, arduino shields and projects to select from on internet.)

Some sensors modules for Arduino board

Arduino shields examples for various tasks

Have Fun.