ARDUINO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE SOFTWARE
ARDUINO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE CODE

Supplying more than the operating voltage of the Arduino on any pin is very dangerous.

Supplying more than 5v (3.3v) to an input pin.

The ATmega chip on your Arduino can only supply 200mA in total, so driving more than 10 LEDs 20mA each, for example, will eventually damage your board.

Drawing more than 200mA from all output pins together.

The pins go through the circuit board, so make sure you don't place the Arduino on a conductive (metal) surface, because it will short out the pins. Shorting an output in to the +5v, +3.3v or the ground pins, will also kill your board: If an output pin is at 5v for example, and you connect it to the ground, it draws an enormous amount of current, and kills your Arduino almost instantly.

In the course of this Instructable, I'll explain what you should do instead. An Arduino can only supply 40mA per output pin, so you cannot drive a motor or a speaker directly, for example, and you cannot connect an LED directly (without a resistor). Drawing more than 40mA from an output pin.To get an idea of what you can do with an Arduino board, check out the Arduino blog or the Arduino channel here on Instructables.īefore you begin plugging things into your new Arduino, it may be good to know what can damage the board. You can buy an Arduino from their website or from a local reseller for about $22 (€20). Through the USB connection you can also use it to control your computer, or use your computer to control the Arduino.Īs you can see, the sky's pretty much the limit ! The I/O pins (Input/Output) can be used as input pins, to connect buttons or knobs, temperature sensors, light sensors, or even keyboards and mouses, digital musical instruments … or they can be used as output pins, to connect LEDs, drive motors, control the lights in your home, connect to small displays or even connect to the Internet, so that it can check your mail, post tweets.

ARDUINO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE CODE

You just need to write some lines of code to control them. The pins of the processor connect to the headers, and you can connect them to virtually anything you can imagine. (It only has 32KB of storage, 2KB of RAM, and the 8-bit processor runs at only 16MHz.) For most applications, however, this is more than enough. It's like a really small, very low power 'computer'. The brain of the board is an Atmel microcontroller. It has two rows of connectors (the 'headers'), a power connector and a USB connector. The Arduino Board itself is a blue circuit board, the size of a credit card (but they also have models in other sizes). Maybe a little more information about the board: You can find the complete introduction here.

ARDUINO PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE SOFTWARE

To do so you use the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring), and the Arduino Software (IDE), based on Processing. You can tell your board what to do by sending a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board. Arduino boards are able to read inputs - light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message - and turn it into an output - activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. Well, first things first: What is Arduino? Let's take a look at the introduction from the Arduino website: Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Use this Instructable as a starting point, as a reference, but make your own projects, modify the given examples, try new things, search the internet, the possibilities are pretty much endless! But don't give up!Īlthough a tutorial like this might be very helpful, you'll learn mostly by experimenting yourself. If that's the case, it might be better to skip them for now. Again, if you don't understand a word of those links, don't worry, it is absolutely not necessary for this Instructable, and especially for beginners, they can be very confusing or even demotivating. If you want to know more about about a certain subject, these are great places to start.

I'll provide some links to the Arduino reference page, Wikipedia, and some other interesting sources. Don't worry, it is absolutely normal, it will become clear after reading some other examples in the next steps, just don't get discouraged! There will (almost certainly) be some parts of the explanation you don't understand. If you're a complete beginner, I recommend reading the explanation first, and then the summary. So I here it goes, a guide to Arduino, with the bare basics for beginners and some more advanced explanations for people who are somewhat more familiar with electronics.Įvery step will consist of a detailed explanation, then a summary, followed by a more advanced approach. After some years of experimenting with Arduino, I decided that the time has come to share the knowledge I've acquired.