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What is this Arduino concept that I keep hearing about? Is it a microcontroller family, or a demoboard?

Please include pictures in your answer, and if there are multiple possible items known as Arduino, then let me into the secret :) .. and tell us about a few of those items.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ why the -1? could anyone comment about the downvote? I vaguely remember this being asked before, in which case it should be closed as a duplicate. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Dec 22, 2009 at 13:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ hmm, not a duplicate on this site, although it was asked on electronics exchange: electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/147/what-is-the-arduino \$\endgroup\$ Commented Dec 22, 2009 at 13:40

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To quote their Introduction page:

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

It consists of a demo board with (depending on the version) either an Atmel ATMega328, ATMega168, ATMega8 or an ATMega1280. These chips have the Arduino Bootloader burnt into them, which makes it easy to load your own programs onto them (called sketches in Arduino parlance). It also has a crossplatform IDE to allow you to develop for it, the language is based on a subset of C/C++. There are a large number of add-on boards (normally referred to as shields) which allow you to interact with the Arduino or extend its' capabilities.

All of this is open source including the board designs, so you can either buy a premade board, or make your own. The boards are relatively cheap (about £25 for a Duemilanove at the moment) and there is a thriving community of people using/developing/hacking with them.

Here's a picture of one:

Duemanilove

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    \$\begingroup\$ Edward, why have you copy and pasted my answer from Electronics Exchange without attributing it to me? Plus if you are going to copy questions and answers across surely you should be making them Community Wiki. If you are planning on closing down Electronics Exchange is it not possible to copy over users/questions/answers/votes wholesale? Or could you copy them all over as either closed questions or Community Wiki? \$\endgroup\$ Commented Dec 22, 2009 at 20:06
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The wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino provides an excellent description of the Arduino and variants.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ This answer is the polite version of lmgtfy.com/?q=Arduino \$\endgroup\$ Commented Dec 22, 2009 at 10:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ I applaud this poster for their politeness - it is seriously undeserved in this case.... \$\endgroup\$ Commented May 17, 2011 at 15:49
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The Arduino is a development board for either the Atmel ATMega168 or ATMega328 microcontrollers. It offers a standard USB serial port as well as headers for a variety of 'shields' that fit over the dev board to offer additional functionality such as motor drivers, SD cards, etc. It comes with its own variant of C programming language that aims to make things a bit easier for people who haven't ever programmed before.

There are several different versions of it both official and unofficial. Some of the unofficial versions use surface mount components and have a different layout that precludes the use of the shields. There is also a 'mega' version that uses the ATMega1280 uC and has many more timers, UARTs and other peripherals than the original version. Most shields are compatible with the mega version but some are not.

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Presented without comment, the home page for the Arduino platform:

http://www.arduino.cc

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