Daniel Jones - Arduino: The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Learn Arduino

Arduino is a computer company that works in both the software and hardware that a computer uses. The community that uses Arduino is going to be the ones that design and manufacture the microcontrollers and microcontroller kits that are located on a single board.

The Arduino boards are used to build digital devices as well as other interactive objects that are going to be able to control things in the physical world around us. These products are going to be using an open source hardware as well as an open sourced software that has been licensed under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) as well as the GPL (GNU General Public License so that the boards can be manufactured and distributed to the public. You can find an Arduino board either preassembled or in a kit that will allow you to build it yourself.

The design of the board is going to vary based on what sort of controllers or microprocessors it will contain. The board is going to be equipped with both digital and analog input and output pins that are going to allow the Arduino board to interact with expansion boards and even other circuits. There is a feature on the Arduino board that allows the communication interfaces to be used. This includes the use of USBs on a few of the Arduino models which will allow for programs to be loaded off of a personal computer.

Arduino's microcontrollers are going to be programmed to use a dialect that is going to use the programming language of C as well as C++. It also uses a compiler toolchain that is more traditional in order to provide an integrated development environment (IDE) that is going to be based on the programming language that it works with.

The Arduino project began in 2003 in Italy initially as a program for the students that were attending the Interaction Design Institute. The purpose of the project was to try and provide an easy and cost-effective way for a novice as well as a professional to be able to create a device that would allow them to interact with the environment around them through the use of actuators and sensors.

Some of the most typical examples of which the devices interact are things such as a thermostat, a motion detector, and even robots.

Arduinos name came from one of the bars that can be found in Ivrea, Italy in which the founders would meet to discuss their ideas. This bar was named after the March of Ivrea and the King of Italy back in 1002 to 1014.

Chapter two: Hardware, Software, and Applications

Being that Arduino is an open source hardware, there are going to reference designs to the hardware that are going to be sent out through the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License which also means that they are available on the Arduino website. The layout and even the production files are going to be available depending on which version you are working with.

Even the source code has been released to the public because of the GNU General Public License. However, an official Bill of Materials for the boards has not and probably will not be published by the staff that works with Arduino.

Despite the fact that the designs for the hardware and software are free, the name Arduino is strictly exclusive to the boards in order to make sure that it cannot be used for any other boards without permission from the company. In fact, the documentation that is in place for the Arduino name specifically says that the project is open to working with others to incorporate them into the official product.

Several products are compatible with Arduino that were released commercially so that they could avoid having other products out on the market with the suffix -duino. A vast majority of the boards are going to have an Atmel 8-bit AVR microcontroller. Which consists of different amounts of pins, flash memory, and various other features. If you are using the 32-but board, then it will work with an Atmel SAM3X8E which was introduced back in 2012. All of the boards are going to use a single or double row of pins that are going to facilitate the connections needed so programs and other circuits can work with it properly.

The boards that you are able to purchase are:

1. Arduino RS232
2. Arduino Diecimila
3. Arduino Duemilanove
4. Arduino Uno R2
5. Arduino Uno SMD R3
6. Arduino Leonardo
7. Arduino Pro
8. Arduino Mega
9. Arduino Nano
10. Arduino LilyPad 00
11. Arduino Robot
12. Arduino Esplora
13. Arduino Ethernet
14. Arduino Yun
15. Arduino Due

Shields

Any Arduino or devices that are compatible will use a circuit expansion board known as a shield that will be able to be plugged into the pin heads. A shield is going to be able to provide the controls that are needed for 3D printing and other applications such as GPS or liquid crystal displays. You even have the option of making your shield.

Software

Any program that is written for Arduino is going to be written in any programming language that you want it to be written in as long as it is able to be produced by a binary machine code for the target processor. The Atmel is going to give you a development environment that will work with the microcontrollers.