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What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open hardware and software platform used to develop an infinite amount of creative or technical devices. It’s famous among artists and electronic engineers who work on developing interactive installations and new media projects. Since Arduino has open hardware structure, it can be built by hand or can be purchased pre-assembled. The open structure of an Arduino board even lets users adapt it in any way they need.

A pre-assembled Arduino gets a microcontroller which is programmed using Arduino development environment. This easy to use platform along with the open source community that has developed over the years essentially allows anyone to program and build complex systems with minimal coding knowledge. If you go deeper however, you will come to know that Arduino programming is the simplified version of C and C++ programming languages and in Arduino they are called “Sketches”.

What is an Arduino Used For?

If you search the internet, you will find Arduino to be the brain of many projects. They are used in everyday objects and are also used to build many complex scientific devices. Many students, specifically belonging from electronics stream, use Arduino to build projects. People dealing with robotics also use Arduino. Many communities have even started using Arduino to make IoT based applications like 3D printers and many types of wearables, smart devices, etc.

What is an Arduino Made of?

If you take a look at an Arduino board, you will find that there are a number of small electronic components combined together in an ingenious way.

Here are some of the main components you’ll be interacting with on a standard Arduino board:

  • Connector pins
  • Power connector
  • Microcontroller
  • USB port

If you want to find out more about each of these parts, check out our post Parts of an Arduino Board.

How Do You Program an Arduino?

People working on Arduino usually use the official integrated development environment (image to the right), but recently they have released an online editor (image below). The official Arduino IDE is an open source software which was developed with Java and can be used on any operating system like Windows, Linux, MAC etc. The IDE allows you to program Arduino with syntax highlighting along with many other features that makes coding easier. Once your code is completed, just upload it to your Arduino board with the click of a button.

In short, Arduino is a fantastic foundation for any electronics based project because it gives you simple yet robust hardware in combination with an understandable and usable software, creating one of the most efficient and effective platforms for making ideas a reality.

~split~


What is Arduino?

What is Arduino Used For?

What is Arduino Board?