What is Arduino

Arduino 

           All the College students are roaming in and around the college with Arduino boards on their hand but many of them may not even know the basic of it. This board places many roles in different fields of engineering irrespective of the departments. So let's see about this Board in detail.

          

      

      

        You can see a blue board on the top image. This is so-called Arduino UNO board, it is just a type of Arduino boards which is available in common. Arduino is an open platform to do all the projects related to sensors and controllers. The boards are equipped with sets of digital and analogue input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards ('shields') or for prototyping and other circuits. The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, which are also used for loading programs from personal computers. The microcontrollers can be programmed using C and C++ programming languages. In addition to using traditional compiler toolchains, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing language project.

ARDUINO PINS

Power 

• Every Arduino board needs a way to be connected to a power source. The Arduino UNO can be powered from a USB cable coming from your computer or a wall power supply that is terminated in a barrel jack. In the picture above the USB connection is labelled (1) and the barrel jack is labelled (2).

• The USB connection is also how you will load code onto your Arduino board.

NOTE: Do NOT use a power supply greater than 20 Volts as you will overpower (and thereby destroy) your Arduino. The recommended voltage for most Arduino models is between 3 and 12 Volts.

Pins (5V, 3.3V, GND, Analog, Digital, PWM, AREF)

• The pins on your Arduino are the places where you connect wires to construct a circuit probably in conjunction with a breadboard and some wire. They usually have black plastic ‘headers’ that allow you to just plug a wire right into the board. 

• The Arduino has several different kinds of pins, each of which is labelled on the board and used for different functions.

• GND (3): Short for ‘Ground’. There are several GND pins on the Arduino, any of which can be used to ground your circuit.

• 5V (4) & 3.3V (5): As you might guess, the 5V pin supplies 5 volts of power, and the 3.3V pin supplies 3.3 volts of power. Most of the simple components used with the Arduino run happily off of 5 or 3.3 volts.

• Analog (6): The area of pins under the ‘Analog In’ label (A0 through A5 on the UNO) are Analog In pins. These pins can read the signal from an analogue sensor (like a temperature sensor) and convert it into a digital value that we can read.

• Digital (7): Across from the analogue pins are the digital pins (0 through 13 on the UNO). These pins can be used for both digital input (like telling if a button is pushed) and digital output (like powering an LED).

• PWM (8): You may have noticed the tilde (~) next to some of the digital pins (3, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11 on the UNO). These pins act as normal digital pins, but can also be used for something called Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM). We have a tutorial on PWM, but for now, think of these pins as being able to simulate analogue output (like fading an LED in and out).

• AREF (9): Stands for Analog Reference. Most of the time you can leave this pin alone. It is sometimes used to set an external reference voltage (between 0 and 5 Volts) as the upper limit for the analogue input pins.

Reset Button

The Arduino has a reset button (10). Pushing it will temporarily connect the reset pin to ground and restart any code that is loaded on the Arduino. This can be very useful if your code doesn’t repeat, but you want to test it multiple times.

Power LED Indicator

Just beneath and to the right of the word “UNO” on your circuit board, there’s a tiny LED next to the word ‘ON’ (11). This LED should light up whenever you plug your Arduino into a power source. If this light doesn’t turn on, there’s a good chance something is wrong. Time to re-check your circuit!

TX RX LEDs

TX is short for transmitting, RX is short for receive. These markings appear quite a bit in electronics to indicate the pins responsible for serial communication. 

In our case, there are two places on the Arduino UNO where TX and RX appear -- once by digital pins 0 and 1, and a second time next to the TX and RX indicator LEDs (12). 

These LEDs will give us some nice visual indications whenever our Arduino is receiving or transmitting data (like when we’re loading a new program onto the board).

Main IC

The black thing with all the metal legs is an IC, or Integrated Circuit (13). Think of it as the brains of our Arduino. 

The main IC on the Arduino is slightly different from board type to board type but is usually from the ATmega line of IC’s from the ATMEL company. 

This can be important, as you may need to know the IC type (along with your board type) before loading up a new program from the Arduino software. This information can usually be found in writing on the top side of the IC.

 If you want to know more about the difference between various IC's, reading the datasheets is often a good idea.

Voltage Regulator

The voltage regulator (14) is not actually something you can (or should) interact with on the Arduino. But it is potentially useful to know that it is there and what it’s for. 

The voltage regulator does exactly what it says -- it controls the amount of voltage that is let into the Arduino board. 

Think of it as a kind of gatekeeper; it will turn away an extra voltage that might harm the circuit. Of course, it has its limits, so don’t hook up your Arduino to anything greater than 20 volts.

Why Arduino?

            Thanks to its simple and accessible user experience, Arduino has been used in thousands of different projects and applications. The Arduino software is easy-to-use for beginners, yet flexible enough for advanced users. 

           It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Teachers and students use it to build low-cost scientific instruments, to prove chemistry and physics principles, or to get started with programming and robotics. 

         Designers and architects build interactive prototypes, musicians and artists use it for installations and to experiment with new musical instruments. Makers, of course, use it to build many of the projects exhibited at the Maker Faire, for example.

             Arduino is a key tool to learn new things. Anyone - children, hobbyists, artists, programmers - can start tinkering just following the step by step instructions of a kit, or sharing ideas online with other members of the Arduino community.

        

        There are many other microcontrollers and microcontroller platforms available for physical computing. Parallax Basic Stamp, Netmedia's BX-24, Phidgets, MIT's Handyboard, and many others offer similar functionality. All of these tools take the messy details of microcontroller programming and wrap it up in an easy-to-use package. 

            Arduino also simplifies the process of working with microcontrollers, but it offers some advantage for teachers, students, and interested amateurs over other systems:

• Inexpensive - Arduino boards are relatively inexpensive compared to other microcontroller platforms. The least expensive version of the Arduino module can be assembled by hand, and even the pre-assembled Arduino modules cost less than Rs.600

• Cross-platform - The Arduino Software (IDE) runs on Windows, Macintosh OSX, and Linux operating systems. Most microcontroller systems are limited to Windows.

• Simple, clear programming environment - The Arduino Software (IDE) is easy-to-use for beginners, yet flexible enough for advanced users to take advantage of as well. For teachers, it's conveniently based on the Processing programming environment, so students learning to program in that environment will be familiar with how the Arduino IDE works.

• Open source and extensible software - The Arduino software is published as open-source tools, available for extension by experienced programmers. The language can be expanded through C++ libraries, and people wanting to understand the technical details can make the leap from Arduino to the AVR C programming language on which it's based. Similarly, you can add AVR-C code directly into your Arduino programs if you want to.

• Open source and extensible hardware - The plans of the Arduino boards are published under a Creative Commons license, so experienced circuit designers can make their own version of the module, extending it and improving it. Even relatively inexperienced users can build the breadboard version of the module in order to understand how it works and save money.

So these are basic components in this Arduino board, We will see about Arduino IDE and simple projects on the next post.

"In the world of fluctuations be someone's regulator"

With love,

Immanuel Aakash V