Arduino basics

Overview

The Arduino microcontroller is an easy to use yet powerful single board computer that has gained considerable traction in the hobby and professional market. The Arduino is open-source, which means hardware is reasonably priced and development software is free. This guide is for students in ME 2011, or students anywhere who are confronting the Arduino for the first time. For advanced Arduino users, prowl the web; there are lots of resources.

The Arduino project was started in Italy to develop low cost hardware for interaction design. An overview is on the Wikipedia entry for Arduino. The Arduino home page is http://www.arduino.cc/.

The Arduino hardware comes in several flavors. In the United States, Sparkfun (www.sparkfun.com) is a good source for Arduino hardware.

This guide covers the Arduino Uno board (Sparkfun DEV-09950, $29.95), a good choice for students and educators. With the Arduino board, you can write programs and create interface circuits to read switches and other sensors, and to control motors and lights with very little effort.

Many of the pictures and drawings in this guide were taken from the documentation on the Arduino site, the place to turn if you need more information. The Arduino section on the ME 2011 web site, https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/me2011/, covers more on interfacing the Arduino to the real world.

This is what the Arduino board looks like.