Familiarize with Arduino Board!!

Arduino Uno is the simplest and best developer board for beginners! But, What is an Arduino?

    We develop basic circuits on PCB manually,and at times to control the LEDs use switches.To switch it on and off we have to manually press switches.What if we replace them with transistors and a one in which there is no need to manually switch it on and off if we desire it to follow a regular pattern.This is where our micro-controllers come into play.These micro-controllers are the brain of a electronic device.the application is not limited to the LEDs ,that was a mere example.Ranging from these LEDs to bigger Robots and Machines,the micro-controllers are in use.

    Arduino comes with a number of developer boards that differ in pins,controller and processors.The Arduino Uno uses ATmega328P microprocessor.It is an open source micro-controller and you can find all the circuits on its website .Uno board is chosen as its easily available and cloned version is available at a cheaper rate.Remember the 2C's required for the selection of boards Capacity and Compatibility for the selection of boards.

     Let us look into the various parts of Arduino Uno. To begin with,the arduino has a USB port through which the program written uploaded from the computer to the arduino and exchange data.Moreover it serves as power to arduino. We can also power arduino through a special slot in which we insert a battery. As another source of power supply ,power pins are also present on the board.More than 1 mode of power supply is not encouraged at a time.Besides we have many sockets on its both side,also referred as pins,digital and analog ,to which we connect all the components.Some of these pins can serve as both input and output.They are 14 digital pins(0-13) gives either 0 or 1 outputs ,among which 6 are PWM pins(3,5,6,9,10,11) used to drive analog output, present at the top of the board.These pins are collectively name GPIO(General Purpose Input Output) pins.That is using the PM signals you can precisely control the power delivered to the load effectively .To the bottom right corner there are 6 analog pins(A0 - A5) can accept analog input signals.You cannot power up a DC motor using analog pins since motors require more power.

    There are some LEDs already present on the board to indicate data exchange.There is a voltage regulator on the board to regulate peripheral pins voltage and also to regulate power intake.Output voltage to peripherals may be 3.3V or 5V.There is a push button used to reset the board(pause everything and start from beginning).In addition there is a silver colored crystal oscillator(electronic clock) used for communicate to external components and maintain rate of data transfer.There is a capacitor and resister present on board(RC filter) to stop reversal of current for protection and to provide smooth current flow.

    The micro-controller has UART,a computer hardware device  whose main purpose is to send and receive data as per serial communication in which data format and speed are configurable.Electric signaling and methods are handled by driver circuit external to UART-Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter. The entire arduino communicates to next arduino using master slave protocols.The ICSP -In Circuit Serial Programming, a method of programming micro-controllers is used here.It is used to program board without the USB.

    That was all about the Arduino Uno board. But all of it was a beginning to this electronic device.Hope this might have given you insights.

Keep reading and stay awaited.