What is Arduino?
Arduino is simply a microcontroller based platform for beginers to embedded system designers, which voids all the complexities in developing an embedded system. Arduino believes in open hardware open software concept.
Open Hardware & Open Software?
Open hardware/software means all the source files are free and can be modified and shared or used for commercial or educational purposes without an explicit written permission from the creator.
Getting a little more technical on Arduino.
Arduino consists of three integral parts:
1. The Hardware: it consists of the central controller core, (lets take most popular arduino uno for better description), which is an 8 bit AVR microcontroller, ATMEGA 328PU. and its supporting hardware connections. The integral support connections are the power supply unit needed to power up the system and the crystal oscillator circuitry which is required by all microcontroller circuits (external or internal; in case of arduino uno they have decided to go with a 16 MHz external clock source), as clock source. So as you can see the hardware section is no big deal. But there is a teeny little addition that unleash the true easy operation with arduino that made it so popular. Its has an extra ATMEGA 8U4 IC configured (pre-programmed) as an USB to serial converter which acts as a bridging chip between the computer and our arduino board (In older arduino boards like duemilanove, they used FTDI bridging chips like FT232RL), enabling us to transfer the program to the board without the need of an external programmer, and also use the same for serial communication or monitoring of different processes.
2. The Bootloader: This is the most integral part of arduino eco-system. A bootloader is a small program that must be burned into the chip using an external programmer. Once the arduino bootloader is in the chip it does the same like any other embedded program run the program indefinitely. But the magic of arduino bootloader is that it is programmed to accept the user written programs (written in arduino console) serially and store it into its program memory. Thus the the bootloader avoids the need of external programmer, and allow us to emulate our program just like after the same program is burned using and external programmer, but avoids the complications a beginner might face, if he is going to burn the program instead of serial uploading it.
3. The Software: Arduino IDE is very simple and clean IDE. Since it is developed with beginners in my, it does not have lot of options which otherwise would freak out a beginner. I myself freaked out when I tried to study the good old 8051 using Keil during my first year Engineering. So starting with a less complicated simpler interface is always good, and you can then migrate to stronger and powerful development tools, once you get basic right. Also the software removed some of more complex operations by providing much more text like functions that the beginners can understand right away.
References and Downloads
You can always refer to Arduino at their official Website click here
For Official Arduino software download click here
If in case any linux users find any kind of problem setting up your arduino. Please feel free to mail me to syam.nair@thakshashila.in or message me in my facebook profile
Syam S Nair 