Introduction to ‘ARDUINO’
For many years the field of
embedded electronics has been this complicated field of IC ‘s and these complex
sensors . The main tool of the trade which was used by the engineers were the
development boards which were provided by the chip manufacturing companies . A
great level of skill and knowledge was required to interface all the right
components in the right way to make the circuit work .The main disadvantage of
these boards was the great deal of paraphernalia which was required to program
the IC‘s(integrated circuit ). For eg:- to program an IC a serial to parallel
converter(device programmer ) was needed . A separate powers supply was needed
to power the board. Thus the need for a single hardware and software platform
which could be powerful yet easy to use was felt.
Arduino is a open source
electronics prototyping platform based on flexible hardware and software .Its
intended for hobbyists, artists designers and anybody who wants to create
interactive objects or environments. Arduino literally means disambiguation or
illumination. Arduino started in 2005 as a project for students at the Interaction
Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. The core Arduino developer team is
composed of Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, David
Mellis and Nicholas Zambetti .Arduino is a single-board microcontroller,
intended to make the application of interactive objects or environments more
accessible. The hardware consists of an open-source hardware board designed
around an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller, or a 32-bit Atmel ARM. The main
advantage of arduino is that it os open
source i.e every aspect of design (hardware) and software i.e source code for
the IDE(Integrated Development Environment )is available online for free . Although
the hardware and software designs are freely available under ‘copyleft’
licenses, the developers have requested that the name "Arduino" be exclusive
to the official product and not be used for derivative works without
permission. The official policy document on the use of the Arduino name
emphasizes that the project is open to incorporating work by others into the
official product. Several
Arduino-compatible products commercially released have avoided the
"Arduino" name by using "-duino" name variants.
HARDWARE:-
An Arduino board consists of an Atmel
8-bit AVR microcontroller with complementary components to facilitate
programming and incorporation into other circuits. An important aspect of the
Arduino is the standard way that connectors are exposed, allowing the CPU board
to be connected to a variety of interchangeable add-on modules known as shields.
Some shields communicate with the Arduino board directly over various pins, but
many shields are individually addressable via an I²C serial bus, allowing many shields to be stacked and used in parallel.
Official Arduinos have used the mega AVR series of chips, specifically the
ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, and ATmega2560. A handful of other
processors have been used by Arduino compatibles. Most boards include a
5 volt linear regulator and a 16 MHz crystal oscillator (or ceramic
resonator in some variants), although some designs such as the LilyPad(version
of arduino specifically designed to be worn or sewn into the fabric of our
clothes ) run at 8 MHz and dispense with the onboard voltage regulator due
to specific form-factor restrictions. An Arduino's microcontroller is also
pre-programmed with a boot loader that simplifies uploading of programs to the
on-chip flash memory, compared with other devices that typically need an
external programmer. This makes using an Arduino more straightforward by
allowing the use of an ordinary computer as the programmer.
All you need to program an arduino is a usb cable .Arduino provides a very powerful
platform for embedded projects . An Arduino Ethernet shield was developed to
provide Arduino users the ability to control their projects over the internet
.The newest Arduino Yún is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega32u4 and the Atheros AR9331 processors. The Atheros
processor supports a Linux distribution based on OpenWRT named Linino. The
board has built-in Ethernet and WiFi. Thus providing excellent bridge for the internet and the real world projects.
Various shields are available in the market which can help in interfacing of
motors, relays, miscellaneous sensors and even cameras.
SOFTWARE:-
The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform
application written in Java, and is derived from the IDE for the Processing
programming language and projects. It is designed to introduce programming to
artists and other newcomers unfamiliar with software development. It includes a
code editor with features such as syntax highlighting, brace matching, and
automatic indentation, and is also capable of compiling and uploading programs
to the board with a single click (A dream for embedded engineers all around). A
program or code written for Arduino is called a "sketch”. Following is a
code for making the LED on the pin 13 ON –OF F for 1 second.
#define LED_PIN 13
void setup
() {
pinMode (LED_PIN, OUTPUT); // Enable pin 13
for digital output
}
void loop ()
{
digitalWrite (LED_PIN, HIGH); // Turn on the
LED
delay (1000); // Wait one second (1000
milliseconds)
digitalWrite (LED_PIN, LOW); // Turn off the
LED
delay (1000); // Wait one second
}
After reading you will notice the
sheer simplicity of the code.
Thus in conclusion Arduino is a symbol
of the open source movement .It has revolutionized the way prototyping is done.
It has been instrumental in providing
the electronics for 3D
printers .
I cannot cover many absolutely
epic and awesome projects which were done using this platform but I urge you to
see for yourself .It’s just a google search away.
-RUTVIJ PATHAK
No comments:
Post a Comment