Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
familiar with as most of us have relied on them for our own earlier studies. However, the very
fact that these are specialized tools with a relatively small base of customers assures that their
costs are very high because of the concomitant overhead associated with traditional manufac-
turing. These high costs make access to the best-automated scientific tools outside the reach of
much of our global collection of scientific labs and at the very least limits even our most well-
inanced labs to a suboptimal selection of equipment. The open-source hardware movement
has provided a solution to these challenges with the rise of a tool that goes by a somewhat pe-
culiar name—the Arduino.
An Arduino is an open-source hardware tool - a single-board microcontroller. 1 You can think
of it as a light-weight brain behind any scientific automation-related task. The Arduino was
originally developed as an electronics prototyping platform for design students in Italy by
Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles. They had become frustrated by the fact that teaching
students the arcane engineering skills necessary to program a conventional microcontroller
left litle time for their students to focus on design, their real passion. In addition, commercial
microcontrollers were obscenely expensive, which greatly limited the number and scope of
the projects they could tackle with their students. They fixed both problems. Arduinos cost
only US$20-$50 depending on the complexity of your project and you will know how to use
them by the time you are finished with this Chapter. At the same time the Arduino team had
the foresight to share their innovation using open-source principles that not only allowed all
of the rest of us to benefit - but also ensured that they now have a world-wide collaborative
team consistently helping make their designs even beter (see the Open-source Microcontrol-
ler Family below).
The Arduino platform hardware consists of a relatively simple board based on Atmel's
ATMEGA8 and ATMEGA168 microcontrollers and on-board input/output support. 2 The soft-
ware consists of a standard programming language compiler and the boot loader that runs
on the board. The software side of the Arduino builds on an earlier open-source software lan-
guage (wiring) and integrated development environment (IDE) (processing). Thus, the open-
source software language (syntax and libraries) is almost identical to C++ with some slight
simpliications and modifications, and the processing-based IDE. Overall, the open-source Ar-
duino environment makes it easy to adapt to your particular project as it is both extremely
lexible and relatively easy to learn and use for beginners. Without any previous electronics
experience, you should be able to get the basics in an hour and get well into a project of your
own in an afternoon.
The Arduino board is a lot like your brain—it is extremely powerful and useful—but for
it to act on the environment, it needs peripherals (e.g. eyes, legs, hands, etc.). The Arduino
can sense the environment by receiving input from a long list of sensors (e.g. chemical, pres-
sure, temperature, light, magnetic, acceleration, ionizing radiation, humidity, electric current
and potential, and vibration, etc.) and then based on rules you set affect its surroundings by
controlling a similarly long list of outputs (e.g. lights, heaters, motors, and other actuators).
The Arduino can act as a stand-alone mini computer running experiments or be connected
to your laptop via Universal Serial Bus ( USB) communicating with software running on it act-
ing more like a data logger. As the Arduino is open-source hardware, you can download 3 the
complete plans for the board and all the software and make your own. This may be the least
expensive route depending on your access to electronics fabrication equipment; however, for
most working scientists, it makes more sense to simply purchase the boards preassembled.
Enormous libraries of software covering most any kind of sensor or actuator that you will
need can be downloaded for free. 4 Although you are strongly encouraged to consider moving
your research-related computing to an appropriate open-source operating system 5 (e.g. Debi-
 
 
 
 
 
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