26-11-2012, 04:25 PM
Arduino
Arduino1.docx (Size: 32.43 KB / Downloads: 39)
History
The project began in Ivrea, Italy (the site of the computer company Olivetti), in 2005 to make a device for controlling student-built interaction design projects less expensive than other prototyping systems available at the time. As of May 2011, more than 300,000 Arduino units are "in the wild."[7] Founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles named the project after Arduin of Ivrea, the main historical character of the town.[8] "Arduino" is an Italian masculine first name, meaning "strong friend". The English version of the name is "Hardwin".[9]
The Arduino project is a fork of the open-source Wiring Platform. Wiring was created by Colombian artist and programmer Hernando Barragán as a master's thesis at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea under the supervision of Massimo Banzi and Casey Reas. Furthermore, Wiring is based on Processing and its integrated development environment created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.[10]
Hardware
An Arduino board consists of an 8-bit Atmel AVR microcontroller with complementary components to facilitate programming and incorporation into other circuits. An important aspect of the Arduino is the standard way that connectors are exposed, allowing the CPU board to be connected to a variety of interchangeable add-on modules known as shields. Official Arduinos have used the megaAVR series of chips, specifically the ATmega8, ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, and ATmega2560. A handful of other processors have been used by Arduino compatibles. Most boards include a 5 volt linear regulator and a 16 MHz crystal oscillator (or ceramic resonator in some variants), although some designs such as the LilyPad run at 8 MHz and dispense with the onboard voltage regulator due to specific form-factor restrictions. An Arduino's microcontroller is also pre-programmed with a boot loader that simplifies uploading of programs to the on-chip flash memory, compared with other devices that typically need an external programmer.
At a conceptual level, when using the Arduino software stack, all boards are programmed over an RS-232 serial connection, but the way this is implemented varies by hardware version. Serial Arduino boards contain a simple inverter circuit to convert between RS-232-level and TTL-level signals. Current Arduino boards are programmed via USB, implemented using USB-to-serial adapter chips such as the FTDI FT232. Some variants, such as the Arduino Mini and the unofficial Boarduino, use a detachable USB-to-serial adapter board or cable, Bluetooth or other methods. (When used with traditional microcontroller tools instead of the Arduino IDE, standard AVR ISP programming is used.)