So you may have heard about a thing called Arduino and you're wondering what the heck it is. So what is an Arduino at 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, quad, copters, 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 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 and on the outside, they have pin headers, which 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.
Now 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, 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.
It's. 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's provided by the Arduino team on your website, and not only is the software open source, but the hardware itself, the actual circuit board that the Arduino is made of.
That is also open source, so you can download the design files if you feel so inclined 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 those with your Arduino.
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