Arduino: A Beginner's Guide to Arduino Programming

Introduction

We are living in an era of technological revolution where we encounter new inventions and innovations each day. The average number of people with technological literacy continues to rise as more and more people become versed in the hardware and software of this digital age.

Whether you are a dabbling hobbyist or a professional engineer, you may have heard of Arduino technology and have found an interest in it for one reason or another. Perhaps you have heard of the flexibility and ease of using it to build gadgets, or you may have seen a variety of projects built with Arduino technologies. And if that’s not the case, then you may have seen some gadgets and wondered how they really worked. Remote control boats, vending machines, and the systems that control elevators or electronic toys all have foundations in Arduino.

Regardless of the reason, if you have an interest or a passion in knowing how Arduino technology operates and would love to use it at some point to design interesting projects for pleasure or for profit, you are in the right place. This book will help you do just that. But before we dive deeper, let’s look at this Arduino thing and how it started.

What exactly is Arduino?

Arduino is a cheap, open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software used for building and controlling electronic objects and interactive systems. All Arduino boards use a microcontroller with additional electronic components to maintain the availability and durability of the computing unit. It also consists of an integrated development environment, IDE, where one can write and run the programs. 

With Arduino, you can design and build devices that interact with their environments. Arduino boards can read inputs—light on a sensor, an object near a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message—using their onboard microcontroller and convert them into an output—activating a motor, ringing an alarm, displaying information on an LCD, or publishing something online, for example. However, in order for you to create this action, you have to program the Arduino board, which I will explain later in this book. Many developers and electricians can easily create prototypes of products that make their ideas come to life using Arduino boards. This has enabled these amazing boards to gain considerable traction in both the hobby and professional markets.

A Brief History of Arduino

Many say that necessity is the mother of invention. Most of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind were in response to an existing problem or need that was lacking an easy solution. That is exactly what happened with the invention of Arduino. In the 2oth century, it was very complex and expensive to prototype new electronics. This was an obstacle to many students in Italy who couldn’t easily afford the BASIC Stamp microcontroller that was going for $100 at the time. This posed a great challenge to Massimo Banzi and his students at the Ivrea Interaction Design Institute.

So Banzi and his colleagues decided to come up with a solution to the complexity and increased costs of building electronics. Therefore in 2003, they worked on a project that had been started by one of their students and they successfully made an inexpensive and easier platform for building electronics. Hernando Barragán’s wiring platform was his Master’s thesis project. The goal of the project was to make simple, less expensive tools for creating digital projects using a non-engineering platform. The result was a wiring platform made from just three parts: an IDE, a microcontroller, and a printed circuit board. Banzi and his team developed the project further and added support for the less expensive ATmega8 microcontroller, which helped them hit their target price for the board that they later named Arduino.

Since that first board was built, lighter and cheaper versions have been distributed through the open-source community. And by May 2011, it is estimated that more than 300,000 Arduino boards had been commercially produced.

Features of Arduino

●  Arduino allows you to load your own code into your Arduino IDE with a USB cable. You don’t need an extra piece of hardware to load a new code into the board.

●  Arduino is a cross-platform software. It can run on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux while other microcontroller systems run on Windows alone.

●  Arduino only needs 5V to power up.

●  You can control the board functions using its program (IDE).

●  Arduino boards are able to read inputs using their onboard microcontroller and convert them into outputs.

●  It is easy to create and upload codes using Arduino IDE. 

●  Arduino also provides a standard form factor that breaks the functions of the microcontroller down into more accessible packages.

●  It is open-source in both hardware and software.

●  The Arduino IDE uses a simplified version