Arduino Tutorial III

Hello. Last time we saw what some commonly used terms mean (was pretty brief, wasn’t it?), and the question was “WHAT IS ARDUINO?”

Well, I will give the verdict and get over with it. Arduino is a development board and or a microcontroller board. It uses an ATMEL microcontroller.

Here:Behold…. Arduino Uno!!

See how it looks like? Yea. It is a board…. See that long thing there? That is the microcontroller there.

So, yea, what about it? What is Arduino?

                                    Arduino

Picture a cool device you see on the internet. A dude built a self balancing skateboard, a girl built a 3D printed robotic arm, another guy built an autonomous robot… imagine all that. This guy up there can take care of them all.

                                                So what is Arduino?

I don’t wanna bore you with the story of “It started blab la bla”. I am just going to keep it simple and straight and fun.

            There was a time that making cool electronic stuff was considered a headache. You write code in assembly language or in pure C. some Italian guys then met (probably over a plate of macaroni! Lol) and then said: “How can we make electronics more simply, reach more people of different background and make the discipline look way less nerdy and …. Well, boring after some time”. The result of this wonderful brainstorming gave birth to the almighty ARDUINO.

            The amazing thing is that the whole thing is open source and free… yea, you can make your own Arduino board and maybe just sell (we all think that way! Hahahaha). So the whole thing was made by these guys so that there would be less stress and technicality in making your own dream project. After the whole world adapted the idea (we all do… we are human), a lot of things- sensors, modules, boards were made to work with Arduino. I would love to point out that Arduino has many boards, but the most used (not necessarily the cheapest) is the UNO (see picture above).

            Just like I said, our Arduino uses a microcontroller and with that comes the need for us to command what we want the board to do for us. To do that, we need to have a way and materials for us to talk to the board and also not the way and materials, but also know how to arrange and pass across our orders in such a way that the microcontroller would understand. The tools we would need is the Arduino IDE and knowledge of C programming language (yo! Don’t panic please. It is quite easier than you think and even if you never wrote a single line of code before, just click the follow button and follow the blog. In two weeks, you will be an Arduino programmer in C language).