What is it?

Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects. Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your computer, used to write and upload computer code to the physical board. The Arduino platform has become quite popular with people just starting out with electronics, and for good reason. Unlike most previous programmable circuit boards, the Arduino does not need a separate piece of hardware (called a programmer) in order to load new code onto the board – you can simply use a USB cable.

The Uno is one of the more popular boards in the Arduino family and a great choice for beginners. We’ll talk about what’s on it and what it can do later in the tutorial.