In this first chapter, we are going to take a look at the microcontroller scene before the Arduino platform was presented. We'll see the changes it underwent that have made it a great success and that have led to it being widely adopted by hobbyists and technology lovers all around the world.
We will also meet some of the more popular Arduino models and compare their characteristics and features so that you can decide which model can be used in your next project.
The introduction, in 2005, of the Arduino platform brought a totally new panorama to the microcontroller scene of the moment.
By that time, working with microcontrollers implied to pay quite a big price just for the microcontroller-integrated circuit itself and all necessary components and circuitry needed to make it work, and even to pay a much bigger price for the development tools needed to program it.
These development tools were rarely made publicly available and in most cases, they were mostly based on proprietary languages or, in the best of cases, in the assembly language, none of which were especially easy to learn for nonadvanced users. On the other hand, the user support was normally restricted and limited only to the manufacturer's microcontroller.
The Arduino platform changed every one of these aspects.
To begin with, it is an open hardware platform that is not only limited to the microcontroller integrated circuit, but it also provides a full board with all the necessary elements to power it, make it work, and connect it to a computer at a fraction of the price of most other microcontrollers available in the market at the moment.
On the other hand, the development environment was made freely available from the first moment as an open source project, consisting of a very simple and intuitive editor with its integrated compiler, based on a subset of the standard, well-known, and documented C language, widely available for many other platforms and architectures. We could say that the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is just C with a friendly wrapper around it.
Last but not least, the Arduino online community was born: it allows thousands of users to share their ideas, projects, and philosophy, which makes them all support each other.
We are going to introduce some of the more popular Arduino models and compare their features and technical characteristics so that you can decide which model best suits the needs of your project.