Arduino IDE | Arduino | Open Source Hardware/Softawre | Arduino Vs RPi

In this post we cover some essential information about Arduino, Arduino IDE and difference between Arduino and raspberry Pi.

Arduino ?

Arduino is the world’s leading open-source hardware and software ecosystem. The Company offers a range of software tools, hardware platforms and documentation enabling almost anybody to be creative with technology. Arduino is a popular tool for IoT product development as well as one of the most successful tools for STEM/STEAM education. Hundreds of thousands of designers, engineers, students, developers and makers around the world are using Arduino to innovate in music, games, toys, smart homes, farming, autonomous vehicles, and more.

The first Arduino board was introduced in 2005 to help design students — who had no previous experience in electronics or microcontroller programming — to create working prototypes connecting the physical world to the digital world. Since then it has become the most popular electronics prototyping tool used by engineers and even large corporations.

The openness and ease-of-use of the project has led to mass adoption of micro-controller based electronics projects and was a catalyst in the creation of the Maker Movement. Arduino has become the number one choice for electronics makers, especially for developing solutions for the IoT marketplace, which has been predicted to become a $6 trillion market by 2021.

Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects. Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your computer, used to write and upload computer code to the physical board.

Arduino IDE ?

The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application (for Windows, macOS, Linux) that is written in the programming language Java. It is used to write and upload programs to Arduino board. This IDE allows for program writing, code verfication, compiling, and uploading to the Arduino development board. Libraries and example code will also be installed.

The source code for the IDE is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. The Arduino IDE supports the languages C and C++ using special rules of code structuring. The Arduino IDE supplies a software library from the Wiring project, which provides many common input and output procedures. User-written code only requires two basic functions, for starting the sketch and the main program loop, that are compiled and linked with a program stub main() into an executable cyclic executive program with the GNU toolchain, also included with the IDE distribution. The Arduino IDE employs the program avrdude to convert the executable code into a text file in hexadecimal encoding that is loaded into the Arduino board by a loader program in the board’s firmware.

In the Arduino Software page you will find two options:

1. If you have a reliable Internet connection, you should use the online IDE (Arduino Web Editor). It will allow you to save your sketches in the cloud, having them available from any device and backed up. You will always have the most up-to-date version of the IDE without the need to install updates or community generated libraries.

2. If you would rather work offline, you should use the latest version of the desktop IDE.

To get step-by-step instructions select one of the following link accordingly to your operating system.

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Linux
• Portable IDE (Windows and Linux)

Recommended : Best Arduino IDE alternatives to start programming

FAQs

Is Arduino software free?

An IDE for the Arduino microcontroller. Arduino is a free software electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.