Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
A brief history of Arduino
First, let's understand a little history and a few definitions. Arduino began in 2005 with a
few brave folks at a school in Italy deciding that providing a simple, inexpensive, easy-to-
work-with
hardware
(
HW
) and
software
(
SW
) platform would be a wonderful endeavor
so that their students could work on their own embedded systems projects. They started
with the Atmel series of processors and then added four key elements.
First, they provided an easy-to-use hardware connection to the processor so that users
didn't need to purchase expensive and difficult-to-use additional HW for this task. Initially,
this connection was done via a serial port; now, it is almost universally done through USB.
Second, they provided a boot program (the program that runs when the processor powers
on) that would configure the hardware and get the entire system to a known state so that
users would have a standard set of hardware with which they can work. This also enables
the contribution of the third key, which is the Arduino
integrated development environ-
ment
(
IDE
). It is a piece of SW that runs on a host computer and allows developers to de-
velop their projects and then upload them easily to the target Arduino development board.
The program can then be run, debugged, and modified through the IDE. Then, when the
program is completed, you disconnect Arduino from the host system and it will run without
any connection to the development system.
The last contribution is a set of
Input/Output
(
I/O
) pins in a standard configuration. This
makes documentation easy, but more importantly, it has allowed for an entire set of addi-
tional capability to be provided by what are called shields. These shields fit on top of Ardu-
ino, plug directly into the pins, and are supported by a code library that allows the user to
easily access the increased functionality.
