Arduino

What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open source hardware and software development company, which means they develop evaluation hardware and software tools. That can be used by engineers, students for their academy projects. Arduino started in 2005 designing and developing hardwares and software in the process they found that there are many micro controllers and semiconductors that serve a different purpose. They wanted to have a single platform for all different hardware so that immaterial of the hardware they should be able to program and run simple example software using a single tool. Hence they came up with 2 plans

Figure 1: Arduino evaluation board

• Open source hardware.
• Open source software.

Arduino open source hardware involves developing evaluation hardware using many micro controllers and microprocessors a few are mentioned below.

• Atmel AVR (8-bit ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, or ATmega2560).
• ARM Cortex-M0+ (32-bit).
• ARM Cortex-M3 (32-bit).
• Intel Quark (x86) (32-bit).

These evaluation hardware are available freely to any designer or developer who wants to use it for their own custom project. They developed many evaluation boards with many Atmel AVR and PIC microc ontrollers. And interfaced these low power micro controllers with many peripheral interfaces that users wanted for a proof of concept project. These peripheral interfaces range from sensor, stepper motors, lcd, mosfets, usb, wireless peripheral, audio, buzzers and many other interfaces. End users had the advantage of evaluating a project using a combination of micro controller and peripherals needed for their projects. It found a lot of success with the development of uno boards. That consumed less power and had 14 gpio pins, 6 were able to generate pulse width signals, 6 analog inputs,  so they developed an evaluation which was compatible or easy to interface with many other commonly used peripherals.

Open source software tools now since they have multiple evaluation hardware there need a common tool that all these evaluation hardwares would be used for programming and flashing. Hence they came up with a common IDE that can be used by all their open source hardwares the tool has a huge database of different libraries that are used by different hardware. The users need to select the hardware type they are using and install the necessary sdk for the hardware. The IDE is a cross platform tool that supports multiple operating systems The important features of the IDE are mentioned below.

• Easy to use.
• Supports multiple libraries.
• Support cross platform. 
• Open source software.
• Highlights syntax errors.
• Provides reference examples.

A simple led blink example found on an Arduino tool is below.

Figure 2: Arduino IDE

#define LED_PIN 13                  // Pin number attached to LED.

void setup() {

    pinMode(LED_PIN, OUTPUT);       // Configure pin 13 to be a digital output.

}

void loop() {

    digitalWrite(LED_PIN, HIGH);    // Turn on the LED.

    delay(1000);                    // Wait 1 second (1000 milliseconds).

    digitalWrite (LED_PIN, LOW);     // switch off the LED.

    delay(1000);                    // release the CPU or delay for 1 second.

}

List of all the evaluation hardwares.

There are multiple open source hardwares a few of them are specified in the below table.

List of all packages that Arduino software tool supports.

Bello are few of the hardwares the IDE supports.