CHAPTER 1
Welcome to the Arduino
The Arduino was originally built for designers and artists—people with little
technical expertise. Even if they didn’t have programming experience, the
Arduino enabled them to create sophisticated design prototypes and some
amazing interactive artwork. So, it should come as no surprise that the first
steps with the Arduino are very easy, even more so for people with a strong
technical background.
But it’s still important to get the basics right. You’ll get the most out of
working with the Arduino if you familiarize yourself with the Arduino board
itself, with its development environment, and with techniques such as serial
communication.
One thing to understand before getting started is physical computing. If you
have worked with computers before, you might wonder what this means. After
all, computers are physical objects, and they accept input from physical
keyboards and mice. They output sound and video to physical speakers and
displays. So, isn’t all computing physical computing in the end?
In principle, regular computing is a subset of physical computing: keyboard
and mouse are sensors for real-world inputs, and displays or printers are
actuators. But controlling special sensors and actuators using a regular
computer is very difficult. Using an Arduino, it’s a piece of cake to control
sophisticated and sometimes even weird devices. In the rest of this book,
you’ll learn how, and in this chapter you’ll get started with physical computing
by learning how to control the Arduino, what tools you need, and how to
install and configure them. Then we’ll quickly get to the fun part: you’ll
develop your first program for the Arduino.
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