A brief introduction to Arduino

Ever wanted to build your very own gesture-controlled robot or Fingerprint Scanner to your room door or the E.D.I.T.H glasses made by Tony Stark? Well, you sure can! With the Arduino you can make products for IoT (Internet of Things) applications, 3D printing, wearable, and embedded applications.

According to www.arduino.cc, the official Arduino website, Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. So basically it’s an open-source microcontroller platform that let’s you to interconnect to various electrical components (LEDs, motors, speakers, GPS units, cameras, the internet, and even your smart-phone or your TV) and make them respond the you want them to. For instance, you can control the brightness of an LED with a potentiometer, open the door lock with an RFID, start a pot of coffee when your alarm goes off in the morning, etc.

The microcontoller is like the brain of the Arduino. A microcontroller can be thought of like a basic computer. Microcontrollers are like a blank slate – no operating system working and they do only the code that you upload and are therefore able to do things more quickly and efficiently

The power of the arduino can be wielded by all kinds of electronics enthusiasts: beginners, professional engineers, hobbyists, artists, designers, hackers, etc.

Bare in mind that the Arduino is not just a single board, there are thousands of different types of Arduino boards available in the market. The difference being cost, physical dimensions, computational power, I/O capabilities, etc. So you really need to think about which board you need to use based on the type of project you are doing. So here are some commonly used Arduino boards:

1, Arduino UNO
The Arduino UNO is arguably the most commonly used boards out there. This board is based on the ATmega328 AVR microcontroller. It has 20 input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs and 6 can be used as analog inputs), a 16 MHz resonator, a USB connection, a power jack, an in-circuit system programming (ICSP) header, and a reset button. It has a 32 KB of flash memory for storing your code. Arduino Shields can be used to add to the functionality of this board.

2. Arduino Nano
The Arduino is one of the smallest boards out there and perfect if your project requires you to fit the board into tight spaces.  This board based is on the ATmega328P microcontroller. This board contains 14 digital pins, 8 analog Pins, 2 Reset Pins & 6 Power Pins and comes with the saem functionality as the UNO. But this board cannot connect to Shields.

3. Arduino Mega

The Arduino Mega2560 can be thought of as the Arduino UNO’s big brother. It has 54 digital I/O pins, 16 analog inputs and a larger memory space for your sketch. It is the recommended board for 3D printers, home automation and robotics projects. The Arduino Mega 2560 is based on the ATmega2560 microcontroller.

Here are a few more popular Arduino boards:
1. Arduino LilyPad
2. Arduino Due
3. Arduino Leonardo
4. Arduino Yun and many more!

Firstly, you’ve got to download the Arduino IDE. This Integrated Development Environment is what you will use to write and upload your code to your Arduino.
Link to download the Arduino IDE: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/HomePage

To connect your Arduino UNO board to your computer you need an A B USBcable; sometimes this cable is called a USB printer cable

Get started with your very own cool and innovative idea!!

Here is the (LINK) video where I understood the basics and start off on this path!!

References:
1. arduino.cc
2. pololu.com
3. wikipedia.org
4. sparkfun.com

Stay Tuned for upcoming posts on Arduino Projects! We’ll start with basic newbie projects and then move on to those cool, ultra techy projects!! Want to be the first to know when a new and amazing post comes up?? Then feel free to subscribe!

Happy Learning!!