All About Arduino

What is Arduino?

I believe with the start of these projects, most of you who are new to this technology are probably thinking " what at all is this Arduino about and what can be achieved from using it?". Guess what, your thinking is not wrong at all and it is time you take a glass of water and read this post to the fullest.

Arduino is simply a tool or a single- board micro-control designed to make computers sense and interact with the physical world. It is an open- source program that consists of both the hardware(the board) and the software(Integrated Development Environment) for programming the board.

Arduino can be used for variety of things that will blow your mind.It can be used to develop interactive objects such as blinking an LED,it can be used to control sensors, switches and other objects by taking input from them and using it to control other devices such as motors, lights etc.It has the ability to transcend through communication devices.

The programming language for Arduino is based on Processing Multimedia Programming Environment.

Reasons for using Arduino 

• Arduino is inexpensive- compared to other micro-controllers,Arduino board is very much cheaper and can cost as low as $30 depending on the type of board you prefer.
• Arduino is cross-platform- this means that it can be used on any operating system platform.Examples Windows, Mac OS, Linux etc.
• Arduino is an open source program- this means that anyone can freely download and use it as well as help to even improve it.

So now, what are you waiting for,simply go to this link http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software and download the software and get started.

Now for the seek of our projects, I will introduce you to the various Arduino boards we have. 

• Arduino BT
• Arduino Due
• Arduino Fio
• Arduino Leonardo and Micro
• Arduino Expolora
• Arduino Mini
• LilyPad Arduino USB
• LilyPad Arduino 
• Arduino Nano
• Arduino Pro
• Arduino Pro Mini

Ok that's enough. We are using the Arduino Leonardo and Micro.

Images  

Arduino Leonardo

Arduino Leonardo with the Bread board

    Installation Guidelines

1. Download the zip file from http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software. Make sure to chose the right platform.
2. Unzip the file to a portal location like your local drive or program files.
3. Insert the Arduino board and wait for the driver software to detect.In windows, the installation will fail so go to your device manager and look for new hardware Arduino. Right click on it and choose update driver software. Select choose from a list of driver software and browse to the location where you unzip the file and select driver in the Arduino folder.
4. The driver software will be updated and the board will be detected.
5. Now open the unzipped folder and double click on the arduino.exe. Arduino IDE will launch and you can start programming with Arduino.

Please check out for more updates soon on video tutorial for the installation and be sure to send me your comments.