Arduino Case Study

4.1 What is Arduino?

Arduino is a software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures computer open-source hardware,open-source software, and microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control physical devices. The project is based on microcontroller board designs, produced by several vendors, using various microcontrollers. These systems provide sets of digital and analog I/O pins that can interface to various expansion boards (termed shields) and other circuits. The boards feature serial communication interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, for loading programs from personal computers. For programming the microcontrollers, the Arduino

The name Arduino comes from a bar in Ivrea, where some of the founders of the project used to meet. The bar was named after Arduin of Ivrea, who was the margrave of theMarch of Ivrea and King of Italy from 1002 to 1014.

Following the completion of the Wiring platform, its lighter, lower cost versions[7] were created and made available to the open-source community. Associated researchers, including David Cuartielles, promoted the idea.

The Arduino project provides the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE), which is a cross-platform application written in the programming language Java. It originated from the IDE for the languages Processing and Wiring. It is designed to introduce programming to artists and other newcomers unfamiliar with software development. It includes a code editor with features such assyntax highlighting, brace matching, and automatic indentation, and provides simple one-click mechanism to compile and load programs to an Arduino board. A program written with the IDE for Arduino is called a

The Arduino IDE supplies a software library called Wiring from the Wiring project, which provides many common input and output procedures. A typical Arduino C/C++ sketch consist of two functions that are compiled and linked with a program stub main() into an executable cyclic executive program:

• setup(): a function that runs once at the start of a program and that can initialize settings.

• loop(): a function called repeatedly until the board powers off.

After compiling and linking with the GNU toolchain, also included with the IDE distribution, the Arduino IDE employs the programavrdude to convert the executable code into a text file in hexadecimal coding that is loaded into the Arduino board by a loader program in the board's firmware.

4.3 Sample program

Most Arduino boards contain an LED and a load resistor connected between pin 13 and ground which is a convenient feature for many tests.[20]

A typical program for a beginning Arduino programmer blinks a light-emitting diode (LED) on and off. This program is usually loaded in the Arduino board by the manufacturer. In the Arduino environment, a user might write such a program as