Arduino Microcontroller Development Platform
By Stephen Bucaro

Arduino is an open source community for the development, extension, and improvement
of an open microcontroller platform. What this means is that no one owns the exclusive rights
or owns the intellectual property rights for the platform. It's a combination of software and
hardware, and its development is shepherdfed by the community. If you use it and extend its
functionality, you are required to document that functionality and donate that intelectual
property back to the Arduino community.
The benefit of the open source Arduino is that the software is free and the hardware
is cheap. This makes it one of the cheapest platforms on which to develop prototypes. Also
by design, the software is easy to learn and it is supported by a huge community of people
who have shared their projects. So you can download code and plans for robots, planes, remote
controlled vehicles, drones, sprinkler controllers, and many more.

Prior to 2015 Arduinos used the AtMel megaAVR series of chips, specifically the ATmega8,
ATmega168, ATmega328, ATmega1280, and ATmega2560. In 2015 units by other manufacturers
were added.
The Arduino project provides the Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) which
supports the C and C++ programming languages. Although the IDE supports inline assembly,
you can't program the Arduino in assembly directly because the USB driver which allows the
IDE to connect to a PC requires the embeded bootloader.
Arduino Open Source Microcontroller Starter Kit

This
Exclusive Arduino Deluxe Bundle includes everything you need to get started with Arduino
- Including the only Official Starter Kit from Arduino (includes the Arduino Uno Revision 3 board),
MAKE Magazine's "Getting Started with Arduino: The Open Source Electronics Prototyping Platform"
and Speed Kits handy PIN-OUT Reference Chart for the Uno R3. No need to shop around for
breadboards, sensors, LEDS, etc. This kit has it all and is designed to take you from Novice
to Expert providing hours of instruction and a multitude of projects.
M. Dashiell says,"This is basically the starter kit bundled with the Make book. I love the
Make book - it is a really good place to get started with the Arduino platform. I personally
think the official kit is the way to go as everything is well packaged and clearly labeled and
it seems like really high quality. I am glad I got everything I need in one package - this was
definitely the way to go.
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