The Arduino platform, introduced in the year 2005, provides an inexpensive way for hobbyists, students and professionals to create applications that can be played in the human interface world using sensors, actuators, motors, and other basic products.
Arduino is a single board microcontroller that can be designed to make applications, interactive controls, and at the same time is environment friendly. The hardware consists of a board designed with an 8-bit microcontroller or a 32-bit ARM. Nowadays, the current model has features like USB interface, analog inputs, and GPIO pins which usually allows the user to attach additional boards.
Common applications include making of simple robots or motion detectors. It also offers a simple integrated IDE or Integrated Development Environment that runs on our personal computers and allows the users to write programs for Arduino using C or C++. Arduino boards can be purchased pre-assembled or as do-it-yourself kits.
The five major benefits of using Arduino starter kits are:
1. Inexpensive – Arduino boards are cheap as compared to other micro controller platforms and Arduino modules
can be assembled by hand, and even can be pre-assembled.
2. Cross-platform – The software can run on Windows, Macintosh OSX, and Linux operating systems.
3. Simple programming environment – It is easy to use for beginners, and also flexible for advanced users.
4. Open source software - The Arduino software is published as open source tools, available for extension
by experienced programmers. The language can be expanded through C++ libraries.
5. Open source hardware – The Arduino platform is based on Atmel's ATMEGA8 and ATMEGA168 microcontrollers.
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