What is an Arduino? Why should you care! | Bloombisect

Quick and Ultimate Guide to know Arduino

Hello fellas! Ever seen small black chips in circuits? Ever wondered what are those for? YES! I am talking about IC’s and Microcontrollers. And also have you ever been astonished about how most of the electronics in your house operate automatically?

• Your Washing machine know when to stop when to add more water,
• The refrigerator knows when to start the compressor and when to stop it according to the temperature
• Your home Inverter knows when to turn itself on when electricity is cut off

You can see all such examples in your day to day life.

Now the fun part is it seems “that somebody is sitting inside that appliance and telling it what to do” and yes this statement is partly true but for the one thing, it is not someone other than the Microcontroller!

If you guess it right, we have to inform it in advance what to do and when to do it period. And to tell it what it should do we have to program it in the language that it understands. That’s the simple logic in the broad term. There is also a field of study that deals with stuff like this it is called “ Embedded Electronics “

To program the machines and tell them in advance how they should behave according to our interests; this thing sounds fun, isn’t it? But who wants to study such a vast field of electronics and then learn to program just for simple fun? I am sure nobody wants that!

That’s where Arduino comes into the picture, now to tell Arduino is an Italian company who saw this eagerness of such tinkerers and hobbyists to create something they want but don’t want to study the whole Bible of electronics and created a development board with a built-in microcontroller. This development board is easy to program through Arduino IDE and we don’t have to worry about electronics stuff anymore.

To say more precisely there is no single board. There are these Arduino boards that the Arduino has launched over the period of time which serves for a variety of applications ( that will be a whole new topic to discuss) and in layman’s perspective, these all boards are called Arduino’s.

This Arduino is an open-source project. Meaning: the blueprints to make one is available for free. That’s why you will find ample clones of Arduino in the market for really cheap. And also there is a huge community online for Arduino so it is easy to learn and troubleshooting.

This Arduino board comes with pins and adaptors. With pins, you can directly connect sensors and transducers available cheap and abundant as an input to Arduino. Eg, Temperature sensor, Humidity sensor, IR sensor, PIR motion sensor, fingerprint sensor, Ultrasound transceiver, etc.

Whereas adaptor is by which you can power your board and connect directly to your computer via USB to perform programming.

The most commonly used Arduino board is Arduino UNO, with Atmel Atmega 328p embedded microcontroller. The software used to write the program is known as Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Arduino has its own simple programming language, it is similar to C++ and C (rather it is the combination of both) with a built-in compiler for you to make it an easy and flawless experience.

So next time any project comes to your mind or you are already working with one and want to make it more dynamic and fun, give your thought to Arduino, I’m sure you will fall in love with it.

Originally published at https://www.bloombisect.com on December 18, 2020.