User manual

INTRODUCTION:
What is Arduino?
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, designed to make the
process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible. The hard-
ware consists of a simple open hardware design for the Arduino board with an At-
mel AVR processor and on-board I/O support. The software consists of a standard
programming language and the boot loader that runs on the board.
Arduino hardware is programmed using a Wiring-based language (syntax + librar-
ies), similar to C++ with some simplifications and modifications, and a Pro-
cessing-based IDE.
The project began in Ivrea, Italy in 2005 to make a device for controlling stu-
dent-built interaction design projects less expensively than other prototyping sys-
tems available at the time. As of February 2010 more than 120,000 Arduino boards
had been shipped. Founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles named the pro-
ject after a local bar named Arduino. The name is an Italian masculine first name,
meaning "strong friend". The English pronunciation is "Hardwin", a namesake of
Arduino of Ivrea.
More information could be found at the creators web page http://arduino.cc/ and in
the Arduino Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
To make the story short - Arduino is easy for the beginners with lack of Electronics
knowledge, but also do not restrict the professionals as they can program it in C++
or mix of Arduino/C++ language.
There are thousands of projects which makes the startup easy as there is barely no
field where Arduino enthusiasts to have not been already.
Arduino has inspired two other major derivatives - MAPLE and PINGUINO. Based
on 8-bit AVR technology the computational power of Arduino boards are modest,
this is why team from MIT developed MAPLE project which is based on ARM7
STM32F103RBT6 microcontroller, the board have same friendly IDE as Arduino and
offers the same capabilities as hardware and software but runs the Arduino code
much faster. Maple project can be found at http://leaflabs.com
In parallel with Arduino another project was started called PINGUINO. This pro-
ject choose the first implementation to be with PIC microcontrollers, the reason was
that AVRs were hard to find in some parts of the world like South America so you
will see lot of PINGUINO developers are from there. PINGUINO project founders
decided to go with Python instead Java for processing language. For the moment
PINGUINO is much more flexible than Arduino as not limited to 8bit, currently the
IDE which have GCC in background can support 8-bit PIC microcontrollers, 32bit
PIC32 (MIPS) microcontrollers and ARM7/CORTEXM3 microcontrollers which
makes PINGUINO very flexible as once you make your project you can migrate
easily through different hardware platforms and not being connected to single mi-
crocontroller manufacturer. The PINGUINO project can be found at
http://www.pinguino.cc
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