If you like tinkering with electronics but time constraints and a lack of knowledge or preventing you from making a start then Arduino is the solution so what is Arduino. Arduino is a microcontroller-based open-source electronic prototyping board which can be programmed with an easy-to-use Arduino IDE Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board and a piece of software the Arduino IDE uses a simplified version of C++ making it easier to learn the Arduino platform has become quite popular with people just starting out with electronics and for good reason the uno is one of the more popular boards in the Arduino family and a great choice for beginners in this video we’ll talk about what’s on it and what it can do the major components of the Arduino UNL board are the following USB connector power ports microcontroller analog input pins digital pins reset switch crystal oscillator USB interface chip tx/rx LEDs now let’s take a closer look at each component the first component is the USB connector this is a printer USB port used to load a program from the arduino ide onto the arduino board this board can also be powered through this port the next component is power ports the arduino board can be powered through an AC to DC adaptor or a battery the power source can be connected by plugging in a 2.1 millimeter centre positive plug into the power jack of the board the arduino uno board operates at a voltage of 5 volts
What is Arduino UNO?
but it can withstand a maximum voltage of 20 volts if the board is supplied
with a higher voltage there is a voltage regulator it sits between the power port
and the USB connector that protects the board from burning out
now let’s take a look at a very important component microcontroller it
is the most prominently visible black rectangular chip with 28 pins think of
it as the brains of your Arduino the microcontroller used on the Uni board is
atmega328p by Atmel a major microcontroller manufacturer atmega 328p has the following components in it flash memory of 32 kb the program loaded from
the arduino ide is stored here Ram of 2Kb this is runtime memory CPU it
controls everything that goes on within the device it fetches the program
instructions from flash memory and runs it with the help of RAM electrically
erasable programmable read-only memory pron of 1 KB this is a type of
non-volatile memory and it keeps the data even after device restart and reset atmega328p is pre-programmed with bootloader this allows you to directly
upload a new Arduino program into the device without using any external
Hardware programmer making the Arduino un o board easy to use next is analog
input pins the Arduino UN o board has 6 analog input pins labeled analog 0 to 5
these pins can read the signal from an analog sensor such as a temperature
sensor and convert it into a digital value for system understanding these
pins just measure voltage and not the current because they have very high
internal resistance hence only a small amount of current flows through these
pins although these pins are labeled analog and our analog inputs by default these
pins can also be used for digital input or output now let’s look at digital pins
you can find these pins labeled digital 0 to 13 these pins can be used as either
input or output pins when used as output these pins act as a power supply source
for the components can acted to it and when used as input pens
they read the signals from the component connected to them when digital pins are
used as output pins they supply 40 milliamps of current at five volts which
is more than enough to light an LED some of the digital pins are labeled with the
tilde symbol next to the pin numbers pin numbers 3 5 6 9 10 and 11 these pins act
as normal digital pins but can also be used for pulse width modulation PWM
which simulates analog output such as fading and LED in and out next is reset
switch when this switch is clicked it sends a logical pulse to the reset pin
of the microcontroller and now runs the program again from the start
this can be very useful if your code doesn’t repeat and you want to test it
multiple times next is the crystal oscillator this is a
quartz crystal oscillator which takes 16 million times a second on each tick the
microcontroller performs one operation for example addition subtraction etc now
we’ll look at the USB interface chip think of this as a signal translator it
converts signals in the USB level to a level that an Arduino un o board
understands the last one is the TX Rx indicator TX stands for transmit and rx
for receive these are indicator LEDs which blink whether the UN o board is
transmitting or receiving data now that you’ve explored the Arduino UN o board
you have started your journey toward building your first internet-of-things
prototype how to get started by your Arduino install arduino ide
install the libraries get familiar with the ide and the programming language by
practicing now bring your ideas to life you