What is Arduino?

So you may have heard about a thing called Arduino and you're wondering what the heck it is.

So what is an Arduino and its essence?

The Arduino is an electronics tool for making really cool things, and people make all types of really awesome things like atomic clocks, quadcopters, pet feeders, art projects, 3d printers, even electron microscopes, and the list goes on and on. And it's going to keep going on for a long time to come.

So you're probably familiar with the term integrated circuit and an integrated circuit is really just a tiny computer that does some type of computation. Now traditionally, integrated circuits have been a little difficult to figure out how to use. Usually, you have to have some electronics knowledge or be able to know how to program in order to get them up and running.

But what the Arduino team has done is make using a specific integrated circuit so easy to use that somebody without any prior electronics or programming knowledge can really get started relatively simply now the way they've done this is twofold.

First, they've made the hardware easily accessible, so the Arduino board itself is just a printed circuit board, and on that printed circuit board is the integrated circuit that you use on the outside they have pin headers that allow you to connect to the integrated circuit and then they've set it up so you can easily connect it to your computer with a USB cable.

Now on the software side, they've created an entire software programming environment that is very streamlined for somebody who's just getting started with programming to make it easier than ever to program an Arduino.

I already mentioned a couple of things that people have made with Arduino, but what can you really do with an Arduino? Well, you can perform logical computations. So let me give you an example of some logical computations that are a little more down-to-earth.

So, an example would be when I press this that happens or when the light comes on that goes off when this opens I get a tweet if the soil is dry add some water, while the Sun is shiny keep the air conditioner.

Now you could even say something more complicated like, “when I press this if the sun is shining and the light is touching here then add some water to the soil then send me a tweet and turn on the AC”. those are examples of logical computations that you can make happen with an Arduino now it wouldn't be the Arduino by itself you'd have to have some extra hardware for a lot of the stuff I mentioned, but I think you get the gist of what the Arduino can do is going to be the brain behind all those computations.

Now if you think this is pretty cool, it gets better and it gets better because the Arduino is extremely affordable. it's going to cost you somewhere between 20 and 30 dollars to get a legitimate Arduino Uno board which is kind of the flagship Arduino and you can do all types of stuff with it in the software you need to program.

The Arduino is completely open-source and free to download. It is provided by the Arduino team on the Arduino website and not only is the software open source but the hardware itself too.

The actual circuit board that the Arduino is made of is also open source so you can download the design files to reproduce.

If you feel so inclined to check out how the thing is actually made it's really pretty cool. It has never been easier to make cool electronic projects, thanks to Arduino, all of those things we just talked about you can do with Arduino.