e.g like designing a full automated house that i can control with my laptop anywhere in the world, designing a rain detector that takes in temperature values from sensors and sent to my laptop for analysis.
during my search, i discovered the arduino board, this board turned out to be better than what i expected, as it not only makes circuit designs easy and faster, itself is also easy to program by beginners.
WHAT IS ARDUINO
An Arduino is an open-source microcontroller development board. In plain English, you can use the Arduino to read sensors and control things like motors and lights. This allows you to upload programs to this board which can then interact with things in the real world. With this, you can make devices which respond and react to the world at large.
For instance, you can read a humidity sensor connected to a potted plant and turn on an automatic watering system if it gets too dry. Or, you can make a stand-alone chat server which is plugged into your internet router. Or, you can have it tweet every time your lecturer enters the class. Or, you can have it start warming your food when your alarm goes off in the morning.
Basically, if there is something that is in any way controlled by electricity, the Arduino can interface with it in some manner. And even if it is not controlled by electricity, you can probably still use things which are (like motors and electromagnets), to interface with it.
The biggest advantage of the Arduino over other microcontroller development platforms is the ease of use in
which non-“techie” people can pick up the basics and create their own projects in a relatively short amount of time.
Artists in particular seem to find it the ideal way to create interactive works of art quickly and without specialist knowledge of electronics.
The possibilities of the Arduino are almost limitless. As such, there is no way that one single tutorial can cover everything you might ever need to know. That said, I've done my best to give a basic overview of the fundamental skills and knowledge that you need to get your Arduino up and running. If nothing more, this should function as a springboard into further experimentation and learning
ARDUINO UNO FEATURES
some people think of the entire Arduino board as a microcontroller, but this is inaccurate. The Arduino board actually is a specially designed circuit board for programming and prototyping with Atmel microcontrollers.
The nice thing about the Arduino board is that it is relatively cheap, plugs straight into a computer's USB port, and it is dead-simple to setup and use (compared to other development boards).
Some of the key features of the Arduino Uno include:
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An open source design. The advantage of it being open source is that it has a large community of people using and troubleshooting it. This makes it easy to find someone to help you debug your projects.
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An easy USB interface . The chip on the board plugs straight into your
USB port and registers on your computer as a virtual serial port. This
allows you to interface with it as through it were a serial device. The
benefit of this setup is that serial communication is an extremely easy
(and time-tested) protocol, and USB makes connecting it to modern
computers really convenient.
-
Very convenient power management and built-in voltage regulation. You
can connect an external power source of up to 12v and it will regulate
it to both 5v and 3.3v. It also can be powered directly off of a USB
port without any external power.
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An easy-to-find, and dirt cheap, microcontroller "brain." The
ATmega328 chip retails for about $2.88 on Digikey. It has countless
number of nice hardware features like timers, PWM pins, external and
internal interrupts, and multiple sleep modes. Check out the official datasheet for more details.
- A 16mhz clock. This makes it not the speediest microcontroller around, but fast enough for most applications.
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32 KB of flash memory for storing your code.
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13 digital pins and 6 analog pins. These pins allow you to connect
external hardware to your Arduino. These pins are key for extending the
computing capability of the Arduino into the real world. Simply plug
your devices and sensors into the sockets that correspond to each of
these pins and you are good to go.
-
An ICSP connector for bypassing the USB port and interfacing the
Arduino directly as a serial device. This port is necessary to re-bootload your chip if it corrupts and can no longer talk to your computer.
-
An on-board LED attached to digital pin 13 for fast an easy debugging of code.
- And last, but not least, a button to reset the program on the chip.
For a complete rundown of all the Arduino Uno has to offer, be sure to check out the official Arduino page.
