Gadget

Arduino: The Hit Among Geeks and DIY Fans

Arduino ntegrated Circuit

Arduino has proven to be more successful than many powerful computing boards that have been in the market for a long time. The Arduino community has grown to more than 100,000 users strong. But what exactly is Arduino? Simply put, Arduino is a programmable circuit board. It has grown popular among designers, scientists, hobbyists, programmers, engineers and hardware hackers. It enhances interactivity to project and objects and comes with a myriad of benefits to the user.

Benefits of Using Arduino

Whenever you use Arduino, you will enjoy the speed and the simplicity of prototyping. You can hook up an LCD and start displaying text in a few minutes. With Arduino, only your imagination will limit you. It has this unrivalled ability to transform the ideas in your mind to great applicable projects. To this end, it is a reliable tool for programmers, designers and hobbyists to express their ideas through real projects.

What sets Arduino apart is that it gives you full control of your projects from prototyping to converting them to real products. With Arduino, you dig deep into the microcontroller to optimize your code and remove items that do not fit. This way, you will have the exact project you have imagined.

To make your work easier, Arduino provides you with code libraries and pre-wiring for prototyping. This helps you test your ideas in lieu of spending all your hours writing codes and building supportive circuitry. This in turn makes the process much less difficult and reduces the time you spend creating.

Arduino for Beginners

You can get information about Arduino online, in work places and also on programming books. If you are just getting started, be sure to understand an Arduino program, learn how to control outputs, comprehend the Arduino board and learn how to connect with your computer. There are a number of resources that beginners can refer to. They include instructables, YouTube, Books and various Arduino Blogs among others. You can also search for other sites that offer Arduino guidelines.

Arduino Integrated Circuit

Why Arduino is here to Stay

One thing that has made Arduino so popular is the fact that money is not a limitation to making your projects real; the barrier is philosophical. You do not need to worry about writing a forest of code, Mac support or even writing tons of IDEs and software. Though chip companies will come and try to beat Arduino’s $30 price, this will not matter as long as the quality and the support that users get from Arduino stays on an all-time high.

The other reason why Arduino is here to stay is that chip companies hate to write a lot of code. They have to write great software for many systems and build lots of libraries and drivers that work on all systems to get more than 100,000 users to beat Arduino. Before a chip company (chip companies make the platforms) makes a board whose functionality and benefits match that of Arduino, Arduino will have developed further.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Arduino is different from chipmaker made boards in that it has sensors to detect your environment, it is low cost and open source, it runs on metal, runs on Mac, Linux and Windows and is easy to use.

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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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