Arduino is a revolutionary technology in the electronics ecosystem.
By this, I do not mean it introduced a new dominant microprocessor or anything like that.
It essentially produced an entire industry, a movement, where there was none existent before it.
I mean the makers movement.
Before Arduino existed, electronics was not interesting and easy to learn as it is today, and there was not so much of resources available.
Arduino was developed in in a city called Ivrea in Italy.
This is where the company that created the first personal computer in 1965 is also located.
Arduino was specially designed to be a learning device ab initio.
This simple fact explains why the original Arduino Core team incorporated several design choices in the programme.
The most important success factor of Arduino is that it is completely Open Source, and is one of the first to do so too.
Both the hardware and software are open source.
For instance, the diagrams of the latest version Arduino Uno board, the Arduino Uno Wifi Rev2, can be found online.
It’s cool because you can build your own Arduino, if you want.
In fact, companies can build and sell their own Arduino clones, and many are doing it.
Additionally, there’s a whole ecosystem of tools, libraries and educational resources around it that made it a huge success.
A few years ago, it was extremely difficult to get boards with material that was practical, students-oriented rather than technicians-oriented.
Today, Arduino has changed all that.
Also, Arduino created an IoT cloud hub, to let you connect devices to the network.
Over time, the Arduino team has released several different boards such as Arduino Uno, Arduino Mega, Arduino Diecimila, Arduino Robot, Arduino Nano, Arduino Micro, Arduino Leonardo, Arduino MKR etc.
Each board has its own use case.
Arduino Nano and Arduino Micro for instance are awesome for IoT, wearables and small devices.
However, Arduino Mega has more memory and I/O pins than any other board.
Nonetheless, the Arduino Uno board is considered the best board for learning so far, and it’s included in many toolkits and used in so many tutorials today.
The Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 board is commonly used in IoT, as it has buit-in WiFi and Bluetooth.
Arduino does not have its own operating system, and it simply runs a single program at a time.
So, you don’t have to worry about anything since there is nothing else than your program running on the Arduino.
In fact, most Arduino boards do not even have network connection, out of the box!
Although some do, like the Arduino Uno WiFi rev 2 or the Arduino MKR WiFi 1010.
Once you load a program, it boots any time the Arduino is powered, either via USB or via the power port via a AC-to-DC power cable or a battery.
By inference, once you have loaded the program, you can put the Arduino on a mountain with a solar panel and a battery, and it will keep running until there’s power.
It only operates programs that were compiled for the Arduino platform, which typically means programs written in the Arduino Language, which is C++ with some suitable features that make it easy for beginners to start with.
This is not to say you are restricted to it.
If you don’t mind having the Arduino attached to the USB port of the computer (or a Raspberry PI driving it), you can run Node.js code on it using the Johnny Five project, which is pretty cool.
What is Arduino good for?
Firstly, it’s awesome for learning electronics.
Secondly, Arduino is wonderful when you want to compile a program for it, attach a battery or a power connector and put it somewhere to run, and play around with sensors and some other really cool stuffs that interface with the real world.
Get yourself a copy now and let’s get started!
