Arduino

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Arduino (disambiguation).
Arduino

"Arduino Uno" Revision 3

Type
Single-board microcontroller
Website www.arduino.cc
Arduino is an open-source computer hardware and software company, project and user
community that designs and manufactures microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices
and interactive objects that can sense and control the physical world.[1]
The project is based on a family of microcontroller board designs manufactured primarily by
SmartProjects in Italy,[2] and also by several other vendors, using various 8-bit Atmel AVR
microcontrollers or 32-bit Atmel ARM processors. These systems provide sets of digital and
analog I/O pins that can be interfaced to various expansion boards ("shields") and other circuits.
The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including USB on some models, for
loading programs from personal computers. For programming the microcontrollers, the Arduino
platform provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing project,
which includes support for C,C++ and Java programming languages.
The first Arduino was introduced in 2005, aiming to provide an inexpensive and easy way for
novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and
actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple
robots, thermostats, and motion detectors.
Arduino boards are available commercially in preassembled form, or as do-it-yourself kits. The
hardware design specifications are openly available, allowing the Arduino boards to be
manufactured by anyone. Adafruit Industries estimated in mid-2011 that over 300,000 official

Arduinos had been commercially produced,[3] and in 2013 that 700,000 official boards were in
users' hands.[4]

Contents

1 History

2 Hardware
o 2.1 Official boards
o 2.2 Shields

3 Software

4 Development

5 Applications

6 Reception

7 Legal dispute

8 See also

9 Notes

10 References

11 Further reading

12 External links

History
Arduino started in 2005 as a project for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea,
Italy. At that time program students used a "BASIC Stamp" at a cost of $100, considered
expensive for students. Massimo Banzi, one of the founders, taught at Ivrea.[5] The name
"Arduino" comes from a bar in Ivrea, where some of the founders of the project used to meet.
The bar, in turn, has been named after Arduin of Ivrea, who was the margrave of Ivrea and king
of Italy from 1002 to 1014.[6]

Colombian student Hernando Barragan created the Wiring development platform which served
as the basis for Arduino. Following the completion of the Wiring platform, its lighter, less
expensive versions[7] were created and made available to the open-source community; associated
researchers, including David Cuartielles, promoted the idea. The Arduino's initial core team
consisted of Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis.
[5]

Hardware
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this
article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged
and removed. (May 2013)

An official Arduino Uno with descriptions of the I/O locations

An early Arduino board[8] with an RS-232 serial interface (upper left) and an Atmel ATmega8
microcontroller chip (black, lower right); the 14 digital I/O pins are located at the top and the six
analog input pins at the lower right.
An Arduino board consists of an Atmel 8-, 16- or 32-bit AVR microcontroller with
complementary components that facilitate programming and incorporation into other circuits. An
important aspect of the Arduino is its standard connectors, which lets users connect the CPU
board to a variety of interchangeable add-on modules known as shields. Some shields
communicate with the Arduino board directly over various pins, but many shields are
individually addressable via an IC serial busso many shields can be stacked and used in
parallel. Official Arduinos have used the megaAVR series of chips, specifically the ATmega8,
ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, and ATmega2560. A handful of other processors have
been used by Arduino compatibles. Most boards include a 5 volt linear regulator and a 16 MHz
crystal oscillator (or ceramic resonator in some variants), although some designs such as the
LilyPad run at 8 MHz and dispense with the onboard voltage regulator due to specific formfactor restrictions. An Arduino's microcontroller is also pre-programmed with a boot loader that

simplifies uploading of programs to the on-chip flash memory, compared with other devices that
typically need an external programmer. This makes using an Arduino more straightforward by
allowing the use of an ordinary computer as the programmer.
At a conceptual level, when using the Arduino software stack, all boards are programmed over
an RS-232 serial connection, but the way this is implemented varies by hardware version. Serial
Arduino boards contain a level shifter circuit to convert between RS-232-level and TTL-level
signals. Current Arduino boards are programmed via USB, implemented using USB-to-serial
adapter chips such as the FTDI FT232. Some variants, such as the Arduino Mini and the
unofficial Boarduino, use a detachable USB-to-serial adapter board or cable, Bluetooth or other
methods. (When used with traditional microcontroller tools instead of the Arduino IDE, standard
AVR ISP programming is used.)
The Arduino board exposes most of the microcontroller's I/O pins for use by other circuits. The
Diecimila, Duemilanove, and current Uno provide 14 digital I/O pins, six of which can produce
pulse-width modulated signals, and six analog inputs, which can also be used as six digital I/O
pins. These pins are on the top of the board, via female 0.10-inch (2.5 mm) headers. Several
plug-in application shields are also commercially available. The Arduino Nano, and Arduinocompatible Bare Bones Board[9] and Boarduino[10] boards may provide male header pins on the
underside of the board that can plug into solderless breadboards.
There are many Arduino-compatible and Arduino-derived boards. Some are functionally
equivalent to an Arduino and can be used interchangeably. Many enhance the basic Arduino by
adding output drivers, often for use in school-level education to simplify the construction of
buggies and small robots. Others are electrically equivalent but change the form factor,
sometimes retaining compatibility with shields, sometimes not. Some variants use completely
different processors, with varying levels of compatibility.

Official boards
Further information: List of Arduino boards and compatible systems
The original Arduino hardware is manufactured by the Italian company Smart Projects.[11] Some
Arduino-branded boards have been designed by the American company SparkFun Electronics.[12]
Sixteen versions of the Arduino hardware have been commercially produced to date.[when?]

Example Arduino boards

Arduino Diecimila in Stoicheia


Arduino Duemilanove (rev 2009b)

Arduino UNO

Arduino Leonardo

Arduino Mega

Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 (front side)[a]

Arduino MEGA 2560 R3 (back side)[a]

Arduino Nano

Arduino Due (ARM-based)

LilyPad Arduino (rev 2007)

Shields
Arduino and Arduino-compatible boards use printed circuit expansion boards called "shields",
which plug into the normally supplied Arduino pin headers. Shields can provide motor controls,
GPS, Ethernet, LCD, or breadboarding (prototyping). A number of shields can also be made
DIY.[14][15][16]

Example Arduino shields

Multiple shields can be stacked. In this example the top shield contains a solderless
breadboard.

Screw-terminal breakout shield in a wing-type format

Adafruit Motor Shield with screw terminals for connection to motors

Adafruit Datalogging Shield with a Secure Digital (SD) card slot and real-time clock
(RTC) chip

HackARobot Fabric Shield designed for Arduino Nano to hook up motors and sensors
such as gyroscope or GPS, and other breakout boards such as WiFi, Bluetooth, RF, etc.

Software
Arduino Software IDE

A screenshot of the Arduino IDE showing the "Blink"

program, a simple beginner program
Developer(s)
Arduino Software
Stable release
1.6.5-r2 / 17 June 2015[17]
Written in
Java, C and C++
Operating system Cross-platform
Integrated development
Type
environment
License
LGPL or GPL license
Website
arduino.cc
The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application written
in Java, and derives from the IDE for the Processing programming language and the Wiring
projects. It is designed to introduce programming to artists and other newcomers unfamiliar with
software development. It includes a code editor with features such as syntax highlighting, brace
matching, and automatic indentation, and is also capable of compiling and uploading programs
to the board with a single click. A program or code written for Arduino is called a "sketch".[18]
Arduino programs are written in C or C++. The Arduino IDE comes with a software library
called "Wiring" from the original Wiring project, which makes many common input/output
operations much easier. The users need only to define two functions to make an executable cyclic
executive program:

setup():

loop():

a function run once at the start of a program that can initialize settings

a function called repeatedly until the board powers off

A typical first program for a microcontroller simply blinks an LED on and off. In the Arduino
environment, the user might write a program like this:[19]

Power LED (Red) and Integrated LED on Line 13 (Green) on Arduino Compatible Board (made
in China)
#define LED_PIN 13
void setup() {
pinMode(LED_PIN, OUTPUT);
}

// Enable pin 13 for digital output

void loop() {
digitalWrite(LED_PIN, HIGH);
delay(1000);
digitalWrite(LED_PIN, LOW);
delay(1000);
}

//
//
//
//

Turn
Wait
Turn
Wait

on the LED
one second (1000 milliseconds)
off the LED
one second

Most Arduino boards contain an LED and a load resistor connected between the pin 13 and
ground, which is a convenient feature for many simple tests.[19] The previous code would not be
seen by a standard C++ compiler as a valid program, so when the user clicks the "Upload to I/O
board" button in the IDE, a copy of the code is written to a temporary file with an extra include
header at the top and a very simple main() function at the bottom, to make it a valid C++
program.
The Arduino IDE uses the GNU toolchain and AVR Libc to compile programs, and uses avrdude
to upload programs to the board.
As the Arduino platform uses Atmel microcontrollers, Atmel's development environment, AVR
Studio or the newer Atmel Studio, may also be used to develop software for the Arduino.[20][21]

Development
Arduino is open-source hardware: the Arduino hardware reference designs are distributed under
a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and are available on the Arduino Web
site. Layout and production files for some versions of the Arduino hardware are also available.
The source code for the IDE is available and released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2.[22]
Although the hardware and software designs are freely available under copyleft licenses, the
developers have requested that the name "Arduino" be exclusive to the official product and not
be used for derivative works without permission. The official policy document on the use of the
Arduino name emphasizes that the project is open to incorporating work by others into the

official product.[23] Several Arduino-compatible products commercially released have avoided the
"Arduino" name by using "-duino" name variants.[24]

Applications
See also: List of open-source hardware projects

Xoscillo, an open-source oscilloscope[25]

Scientific equipment[26]

Arduinome, a MIDI controller device that mimics the Monome

OBDuino, a trip computer that uses the on-board diagnostics interface found in most
modern cars

Ardupilot, drone software / hardware

ArduinoPhone, a do-it-yourself cellphone[27][28]

GertDuino, an Arduino mate for the Raspberry Pi[29]

Water quality testing platform[30]

Reception
The Arduino project received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category at the
2006 Prix Ars Electronica.[31]

Legal dispute
When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders created a company, Arduino LLC, that
owned all trademarks associated with Arduino. The manufacture and sale of the boards was to be
done by external companies, and Arduino LLC would get a royalty from them. In the founding
bylaws of the company, it was specified that each of the five founders was to transfer ownership
of the Arduino brand to the newly formed company.
At the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino's company, Smart Projects, registered the Arduino
trademark in Italy and kept this a secret from the other co-founders for about two years. This was
revealed when the Arduino company tried to register the trademark in other areas of the world
(they originally registered only in the US), and discovered that it was already registered in Italy.
Negotiations with Gianluca and his company to bring the trademark under control of the original
Arduino company were not successful, and in 2014 Smart Projects began refusing to pay
royalties. Smart Projects appointed a new CEO, Mr. Musto, who renamed the company to

Arduino SRL and created a website named arduino.org, copying the graphics and layout of the
original Arduino.cc. This resulted in a rift in the Arduino development team, and although all
Arduino boards are still available to consumers, and the designs are open source, the implications
of this are uncertain.[32][33][34]