Arduino 
top

Official Site

Arduino has very simple programming language. It can be connected directly to your computer via USB cable.

Arduino’s development environment is free.

An Arduino program has two parts, setup() and loop().

Arduino has built-in hardware programmer.

Arduino Uno

It uses ATmega 8U2 for USB-serial connection and it requires no driver for Mac. It can pretend as a USB keyboard or mouse. $29.95.

  • ATmega328 microcontroller
    • Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC architecture.
    • its AVR architecture was introduced in 1996.
    • 32KB flash memory of which 0.5kb used by bootloader. Microcontroller with flash memory was actually very unique.
    • 2KB SRAM
    • 1KB EEPROM
  • 14 digital input/output pins.
    • 6 of them can be used as “PWM outputs” (what is PWM? - PWM stands for Pulse Width Modulation, it is a common method to encode signal onto a wave)
  • 6 analog inputs
  • 16MHz crystal oscillator, i.e. 16MHz clock speed
  • ICSP header (what is ICSP?)

SRAM doesn’t require refresh like DRAM, but it is still volatile memory.

ICSP stands for In-Circuit Serial Programing. This was the way to send program to a microcontroller board traditionally.