What’s an Arduino®?

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Arduino is a brand of small computer platforms and programming software aimed at electronics enthusiasts, artists, and educators. The Italian company provides free documentation and hardware schematics for anyone to use. The platform is intended for interaction with the physical world and can be used with a variety of sensors and electronic components. The brand has become a pioneer in open-source hardware and has expanded to include different hardware, a programming language, and an integrated development environment. Most Arduino projects involve physics processing, and the platform has been used for creative projects such as UAVs and devices that monitor air pollutants.

Arduino® refers to a brand of small computer platforms and corresponding programming software aimed at electronics enthusiasts, the do-it-yourself (DIY) crowd, artists, and educators. An Italian company of the same name designs Ardunio® products and provides free documentation, software, and even complete hardware schematics online for anyone to use or distribute. The technology is primarily intended for interaction with the physical world and can be used with a wide variety of sensors, lights, motors and other electronic components to sense and interact with the environment. A vibrant user community has applied the technology in projects ranging from entertainment gadgets to autonomous aircraft

The Arduino® platform was originally created as a simple and affordable way to introduce Italian students to electronic programming and design, but the project’s emphasis on affordability, ease of use, and open design quickly captured global attention. The company has become a pioneer in open-source hardware, a philosophy where complete hardware schematics are made available for virtually any purpose. The company has registered its name to prevent its Italian-made circuit boards from being confused with poor quality imitations; however, a range of products based on Arduino® designs are available, from cheap Asian imitations to the community-supported Freeduino site which supports unbranded designs based on the official designs. The Arduino® team has fully embraced this spirit of openness with freely available documentation, support, and sample projects, and have even incorporated improvements suggested by other users into their own projects.

Since its creation in 2005, the Arduino® brand has expanded to include a variety of different hardware, a programming language, and an integrated development environment (IDE) for creating software programs. Whether manufactured by the factory team or by other companies, the hardware is often sold as part of a pre-built circuit board based on a microcontroller, which is a small computer that executes software instructions. Electronics enthusiasts can also purchase an unassembled Arduino® kit or even design a circuit from scratch and purchase the microcontroller separately. The main differences found between the preassembled products are the size of the board and the number and type of Input/Output (I/O) options for connecting the microcontroller to other components.

Most Arduino® projects involve some form of physics processing, which means that the microcontroller senses or somehow interacts with its surroundings. In the simplest examples, this might involve nothing more than turning a light-emitting diode (LED) on and off, but the platform has enough computing power for robotics or advanced electronics projects. Artists, hardware hackers, and enthusiasts have used Arduino® products to make some very creative projects including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), devices that monitor air pollutants, and even plants that can call, tweet, or text their owners when they need to. need water.




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