What is Arduino?

Arduino is an open source company in Italy that sells Circuit Boards, they call it Arduino. The most basic Circuit Board is Arduino Uno which has some basic components on it. Advanced Boards like Arduino TIAN, Arduino Ethernet has some added functionalities like Ethernet connectivity, wifi connectivity and much more. Arduino, the company has also released a free and open source Arduino software called Arduino IDE where the user writes the program in a simple programming language and uploads it to the circuit board via the USB cable. We can make basic robots like line follower, light controller, voice-controlled robots, etc. We can also make some IoT based projects using Arduino like smart street light, smart irrigation, smart building using PIR sensor, etc. The most common misconception is Arduino Uno is a microcontroller instead Arduino Uno has a microcontroller on it along with other components.

Why is Arduino Uno Preferred?

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What’s on Board?

1-      It is the main microcontroller on the board. Think of it as the brain of Arduino. Different boards have different types of microcontrollers on it, but usually, it is of ATmega series of ICs from Atmel company. It is 8-bit RISC based microcontroller combines with 32KB ISP flash memory having read /write capabilities.

2-      It’s the Crystal Resonator that controls how fast the microcontroller is running.

3-      It’s another microcontroller that lets us upload the program to the main microcontroller via the USB cable. It lets the microcontroller and computer to move the information back and forth. It is extremely useful in debugging.

4-      It’s the USB connection from where we upload the program to the Board.

5-      It’s the Barrel Jack that is used to power the board through the 9 volts external DC supply.

6-      It’s the Reset Button used to reset the circuit.

7-      They are the power pins used to draw power to any external circuitry. They can draw power of 5V or 3.3V.

8-      It’s the Voltage Regulator. It’s something you shouldn’t interact with. It basically controls the amount of voltage that is let into the Arduino Board.

9-      TX RX LEDs, TX is short for transmitting and RX is short for receiving. There are two places where you will find TX and RX. It appears once by digital pins 0 and 1 and second, it appears next to TX and RX LEDs. Basically TX and RX are used for sending and receiving serial data. We can use this pin to send and receive the data from different mods. LEDs will give us an indication whether the data is being transmitted or received.

10-  This led will indicate us whether our Arduino is ON or OFF. Whenever we connect our Board with the external power supply the Led should light up.

2 – 13 are digital pins used for input and output. Some digital pins have a tilde(~) next to them. These pins act as normal digital pins, but also they can transmit Pulse Width Modulated(PWM) square waves. There are also A0 – A5, 6 Analog pins read the signal from an analog sensor and convert it into a digital value that we read.

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Basically, Arduino is a circuit board that accepts some inputs and give you the desired output. For Eg. Smart Building using PIR sensor project. In this project, you have to take the input from PIR sensor that detects the presence of human and passes it to the Arduino which in turn on or off the light depending on the input. Similarly, you can make Automated Streetlight project using the ambient light sensor. There are many projects which you do with Arduino quite efficiently. 

I hope now you know what is Arduino, the components on the Board and different project which can be made using Arduino. Finally, Thank you.