World of Microcontrollers

What is Arduino?

Many people ask me what is Arduino. They think that it is some hi-fi gadget for the techies. Well it is exactly opposite. It is a tool designed for noobies who want to learn or are interested in programming microcontrollers. It is actually a computer which can be programmed an used to sense and control parameters in the physical world, task which a common desktop cannot do easily.

Arduino board consist of a Atmel microcontroller, typically ATMega168 which normally has preloaded boot loader. Because of this boot loader, Arduino can be programmed without a special program burning tool.

Software part of Arduino consists of Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed and developed in wiring/processing. With this IDE even noobie can write a program for avr microcontroller and program the microcontroller chip by uploading the program through IDE by  pressing upload button.

With Arduino IDE you don’t need to have precise and detailed knowledge of microcontroller’s internal architectures.