You have heard about the thing Arduino lately? Maybe you've used an Arduino in your little project? What is this Arduino thing anyway? Sounds like a sub sandwich. Well in this Blog, I will use plain language to tell you exactly what an Arduino is. You'll learn What is Arduino programming language, and most importantly by the end of this lesson you'll know if Arduino is right for your project.

what is Arduino -

Arduino

I think the best way to explain what an Arduino, is to start with for what you can use it for. Arduino is a tool for controlling electronics. So think about a pencil, a pencil is a tool to help you to write stuff. You need to write something down and you could grab a pencil. Same idea with Arduino. When you need to control some electronic stuff, you used an Arduino.

What do it mean by electronic stuff -

Inputs and outputs of Arduino, Arduino
 There are two general types of electronics stuff.
  • First is inputs that gather information
  • second is outputs that do things
So for inputs, you can kind of think of all the types of sensors out there. Like temperature sensors, light sensors, touch sensors, flex sensors, humidity sensors, infrared sensors, distance sensors, all these types of sensors out there. So, you can think of those sensors as input devices, and those types of sensors can be read by an Arduino board. Now outputs could be things like DC motors, stepper motors, servo motors, solenoids, LCD displays, LED indicator lights, speakers, and electrical stuff that have some type of action in the world. Arduino Board is used to read inputs given by the user in the form of coding and control outputs. So that's kind of what Arduino can do.

How does Arduino work -

So when we talk about Arduino we're really kind of talking about three things. We have the physical component of Arduino which is called Arduino boards. Now there's a bunch of different types of Arduino boards. There is many number of different Arduino boards but the Arduino board which is so popular that Arduino board is called Arduino UNO.  All Arduino boards share one thing which is common, and that they all have a microcontroller on them.

What is a Microcontroller -

"A microcontroller is basically a small computer". So when you are going to learn how to use Arduino, you're basically learning how to use a microcontroller and the microcontrolleris what enables you to read those different inputs, and control those different outputs. So when someone says Arduino board, they're talking about something physical, it looks like this, it's a printed circuit board, and it's got some electrical components on it. But the Arduino is more than just hardware, it's also software and that thing is called the Arduino IDE.
Arduino Microcontroller

What is Arduino IDE -

"Arduino IDE stands for integrated development environment". It is a software application that you download on your computer and then you use it to program the boards. Now it's a completely free software and it's easy to use. It looks a lot like a text editor. The Arduino IDE(integrated development environment) is where you can write your code that its gets loaded onto the Arduino board itself.

What is Arduino programming language -

The main part of this Arduino is the Arduino code. The code that you write inside the Arduino IDE, is what ultimately gets loaded onto the microcontroller that's on these Arduino boards and the code that you write in Arduino is called a Arduino sketch
Now the Arduino code itself is basically C and C++ programming language, but with some Arduino-specific functions and structure. So if you program an Arduino, you're basically gonna be programming in C, C++ programming languages.

What is Arduino? 

There is three things:-
  1. There's the physical hardware that uses a microcontroller
  2. The Arduino IDE is known as the Arduino development environment
  3. There's the Arduino code itself and that's called a sketch and it gets loaded onto the Arduino board
So those are the three components that basically make up what quote or unquote Arduino is and kind of roughly what it does.
ArduinO, Arduino IDE, Arduino Code

Is Arduino is right for your project? 

Well I have a couple different rules of thumb, here's the first one. Most Arduino projects go something like this. You have an input and output, and you also have some logic in between the two. So for example:-  maybe you have a temperature sensor and if the reading of the temperature sensor is above a certain threshold, you wanna turn on some cooling fan and that would be your output. So you have some input, you apply some logic to that input, and then you have an output. Now it doesn't have to be so narrow of an input. You know we could have something like if the temperature is in this range, and the time is this and the sun isn't shining, then you know maybe you wanna turn on a light switch on the radio, and move that lever back to its original position. So if you're project kind of follows this basic idea that you have inputs and outputs and you need to control them then yes, Arduino is probably gonna be a good fit.

Well I really hope your wheels are turning, and you're excited about what you can do with Arduino. Please let me know what you want to build with Arduino in the comments below👇👇