arduino

While not my first microcontroller this is my first Arduino. I've been playing with PIC controllers loaded with the PICAXE bootloader for a while, probably out of some sick sense of nostalgia for the assembler class I took on the Motorola 68000 back in college. I quickly grew tired of managing bytes, words and double words and doing decimal maths the long way so I wandered over to see what the Arduino was all about.

The Arduino is noticeable because it has received a lot of attention lately and for good reason. The Arduino platform has exposed microcontrollers to the masses and has made it cheap. Both economically and in terms of learning time. For about $40 you can be writing code for your microcontroller and turning on and off LEDs -- for $60 you can be up and experimenting with most of the Arduino's base functionality with Sparkfun's Starter Kit for Arduino (a great kit and a great timesaver).

Once you have your Arduino the only other piece that is required is the Arduino IDE and the drivers to make your USB connection look like a serial port. The IDE is a java application so it is pretty painless, the FTDI USB Drivers are included in the IDE distribution and your windows machine should be able to find and install them automatically when you plug in the Arduino for the first time -- the OS X install is almost as painless.

To continue you'll need your Arduino, a USB cable, the IDE and drivers installed and an LED. Open up the Arduino IDE, follow along and we'll create the microcontroller equivalent of a 'Hello World' program.