Preface

The year was 2005 when a few guys from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy wanted to create a simple microcontroller board for their students—a board that was more modern, cheaper, and easier to use than the designs available at that moment. And they named it Arduino, after the local bar, which was named after King Arduino.

The initial version was bulky, complicated to connect, and lacked USB, and other features commonly found these days, but the board had potential. Now, Arduino is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use. Children are building projects using Arduino that only 10 years ago would have required engineers.

The whole design is open sourced and clones of the board can be found everywhere in the world. There is no known number of Arduino boards but it is in the range of hundreds of thousands or even more. Everybody can design their own custom implementation of the standard invented in 2005.

Today, Arduino has been to every corner of the planet and even above it. It has fueled other revolutions such as the maker, the open source and 3D printing movements. It is continuously upgraded to be faster and handle more. But what is Arduino?

Arduino is a microcontroller board, designed to connect to electronics and control them. We can write code for the Arduino that will get data from the environment, and make decisions and take actions based on the data. Robots, 3D printers, toys, even toasters may have an Arduino inside, powering up all the interaction.

This book contains recipes that show how to implement key topics of the Arduino, starting from basic interaction with buttons and LEDs, going up to interaction with the Global Positioning System (GPS), making music, or communicating with the Internet. It is intended for programming or electronics enthusiasts who want to combine the best of both worlds to build interactive projects.