Introduction to Arduino

Hello and welcome to Arduino albert and Arduino 101. If you are confused with Arduino or want to start your journey with Arduino than you are at right place. With this video we will start our journey into the verse of Arduino. We will start with very basics such as what is Arduino? Or how is it useful to you? In future we will go into further details and explore what we can do with Arduino.

Let’s start with what is Arduino? Most common explanation is, Arduino is a micro-controller. Well, it is not completely correct sentence because micro-controller looks something like image above.

And if you are confused than it’s because of name. Arduino is an Italy based company which manufactures this boards. Boards such as Arduino uno, nano, mega etc. Most commonly used board is UNO. It is not a microcontroller but a combination of microcontrollers and some other components. Microcontrollers are basically tiny computers which can execute simple tasks. They are software programable. Arduino uses series of microcontrollers called ATmega AVR. Made by company Atmel. Best thing about Arduino is we don’t have to use assembly level language to program these microcontrollers. But we will get back to that letter.

Ok, so now you have got basic idea about Arduino. Let’s move on to hardware. We will begin with Arduino UNO. We have lots of things to talk about.

First of all, you see GPIO pins. Which are general purpose input output pins. There are pins numbered from 0 to 13, this are digital pins, means you can only use logical levels for these pins. There are some pins with ~ sign. These pins are PWM pins. PWM stands for pulse width modulation. There are some pins with GND written next to it, these pins are for providing common ground. For analogue data there are pins with label A0 to A5. 5V and 3.3V pins give stable output of 5V and 3.3V respectively. Pin Vin can be used to power Arduino. GPIO pin 0 and 1 can be used as receiver and transmitter ports respectively for serial communication. There are two more ports. Using one you can connect Arduino to computer and program it and also power it. Using other we can power Arduino using wall adapter.

Next thing is software. Using Arduino IDE we can program Arduino board to do different task. Language used in Arduino IDE is combination of C and C++. It’s easy to use and not as complicated as assembly level language.

At very first in menu bar we have file, edit, sketch, tool and help menu. After that we have some buttons. These buttons are for compiling our code, uploading our code to Arduino board and to create new file.

Complete code is divided into two parts; setup and loop. Setup runs once and loop runs again and again. We can declare global variables and include libraries outside. So when you power up Arduino board, setup runs first and then loop runs again and again until unpowered. Here is an example of code. you can download IDE from here:download IDE