What is Arduino is the first question for a beginner to this embedded world? Arduino is not a big deal to learn and work on it.
It is an open-source electronics prototyping platform including hardware and software. It is very popular board because of low cost, easy to use and does not require in-depth technical skills to develop any projects.
It is very useful for start-ups, artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in developing their idea. Arduino provides many examples, libraries, and tutorials with its Arduino software IDE many other references available at arduino website.
Arduino uses the Atmel’s AVR series of the microcontroller. It has used Atmel megaAVR series of chips, specifically the ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, and ATmega2560.
This AVR series has a special memory space called bootloader so arduino put some code in it and now this avr chip is able to communicate with the arduino ide with some FTDI or equivalent chip. Arduino can’t communicate with the PC directly because of difference in protocol and voltage level, so we need some USB UART interface like FTDI or any other. Without this, we can not upload/write the code to the arduino board.
There are different boards developed by Arduino from entry level to advanced level.
Table of Contents
Entry Level
- Arduino UNO
- Arduino Leonardo
- Arduino Micro
- Arduino Nano
- Arduino Mini
- Arduino 101
Enhanced Features
- Arduino Mega 2560
- Arduino Zero
- Arduino Due
- Arduino Mega ADK
IoT – Internet of Things
- Arduino Ethernet
- Arduino Yún LininoOS
- Arduino WiFi 101 Shield
- Arduino GSM Shield V2
- Arduino Yún LininoOS
- Arduino WiFi 101 Shield
A user can select the any of the above board as per the requirements. For the complete features and specifications visit the arduino website.
The arduino uno is very popular board in entry level category of the board because it is old and cost effective and almost fits all user requirements. We will also recommend arduino uno because if you stuck with your project and if you google for the solution you will get lots of solution on arduino uno. There is no tight restriction of using the UNO board.
