The Arduino board

The 50 euro robot project that Albert van Breemen published on his Personal Robotics site made me enthousiastic for the Arduino microcontroller. The Arduino is a very cheap and very popular open-source microcontroller based on the ATmega168 processor. The main advantage of the Arduino is that there is a huge number of enthousiasts around the world that have build (robotics) projects based on the Arduino. So there are thousands of projects that can be found on the internet that are very useful to get you started. Here is just a short list of some interesting sites:

• Official Arduino site
• Arduino tutorial
• Electronics tutorial using the Arduino
• The Make blog Arduino overview

The Arduino can be programmed in a C-like programming language. Since the Arduino is open source, all development software is for free! The complete Arduino development environment can be downloaded from the Arduino home page. This environment will give you a great start with 160 MB of tools, tutorials and example code.

Last week I ordered dthe Arduino Diecimila USB board via Robotshop.ca. The price? Only $38,95 which is a little more than 26 euro!

If you're not enthousiastic yet, please have a look at this fun video that introduces the Arduino board: