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Although the first development board of an Arduino is the Leonardo board, one of the most popular boards is the Arduino UNO.
ARDUINO UNO
Arduino UNO is not a microcontroller but it is a microcontroller based development board and is one of the best development boards to start with microcontrollers.
Note: If you already know about all this theory, you can switch to (1) sample programming model (2) preference settings and basic about IDE software (3) Installation process or (4) Direct programming with the first program Light up LED using Arduino
It is simple to use, however it has 14-digital I/O pins, where 6-pins can be used as PWM (pulse width modulation outputs), 6-analog inputs, a reset button, a power jack, a USB connection and more.
Using an Arduino is simple because we have an Arduino environment called IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to program or to code and what we need, just to attach the Arduino with a PC and upload the code / program into a microcontroller that simple.
The cable used for interfacing Arduino and PC is known as “A-B USB cable” (A to B Universal Serial Bus cable), cable used for connecting host devices like computers with other peripheral devices like Arduino, Printers etc.
ARDUINO PINOUT
ARDUINO ONBOARD COMPONENTS
THE ARDUINO SHIELDS
Arduino shields are pre-built circuit boards that are used to give additional capabilities to our Arduino boards, this is the same like interfacing other circuitry with Arduino input output pins but this gives us advantage of less space requirement and easy to install at top of the Arduino.
The different types of an Arduino shields are
- Wireless Shields
- The Ethernet Shield
- The GSM Shield
MICROCONTROLLER USED IN ARDUINO UNO IS ATMEGA328
ATMEGA328 is the microcontroller used in Arduino UNO. It has 28 pins, this is a high performance 8-bit microcontroller designed by company Atmel. This AVR microcontroller is RISC based having some technical specifications:
| EEPROM | 1 KB |
| SRAM | 2 KB |
| ISP Flash Memory | 32 KB |
| A2D Converter channel | 6 |
| General Purpose I/O line | 23 |
| General Purpose register | 32 |
| Communication Modes | SPI, USART, I2C etc |
| Timers/Counter | 3 |
ATMEGA328 PINOUT
Microcontroller ATMEGA328 is a high-performance Microchip 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller combineing 1KB EEPROM, 2KB SRAM, 32KB ISP flash memory with read-while-write capabilities. In addition,
- 6-channel 10-bit A/D converter
- 23 general purpose I/O lines
- 32 general purpose working registers.
- 3 flexible timer/counters with compare modes
- Internal and external interrupts
- Serial programmable USART
- SPI serial port
- A byte-oriented 2-wire serial interface
- Programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator
- Five software selectable power saving modes.
Read Next: Arduino Inbuilt Functions
Also Read: Arduino IDE Installation