Arduino Uno - Overview, Getting Started Tutorial, Reviews and more

The massively popular Arduino Uno board is the perfect board to start any budding electronics engineer. With this board you have endless possibilities from the simple LED blinking to energy monitoring to controlling unmanned vehicles.

The Arduino Uno microcontroller board is powered by the ATmega328. It has an input voltage of 7-12V, 32k of Flash memory and a clock speed of 16Mhz. On the board you can utilize 14 Digital I/O Pins including 6 PWM outputs plus 6 Analog Inputs.

Getting Started Tutorial

Hello World LED Blink

The first project every Arduino engineer learns is to blink a LED, It should take you no longer than 15 minutes for a beginner to see the beautiful little light blinking at you.

Here’s what you do

1. Before you start coding you will need to set up your computer with the Arduino development environment and drivers – Visit the ‘Getting started guide’ at ‘Arduino.cc’
2. Open up the Adruino program from your computer
3. Open the LED blink example sketch (sketch is the term Arduino uses to describe a piece of code)
4. Find your board in the menu ‘tools > Board >Arduino Uno’
5. Select your serial port. If you go back to the menu. Tools > Serial Port menu. It will most likely be COM3 or above (you will need to use a bit of trial and error here, if the program shows you an error select a different port)
6. Finally you’re ready to upload your code to the Arduino Uno. Click the upload icon from the blue menu (it look like a arrow pointing right with some dots) wait a few seconds and you should get a message saying “Done uploading” if not repeat from step 4.
7. Now look at your board the LED on pin 13 with start to blink...blink...blink.

Tinker kits you may find useful

Now that you have mastered the basics and you are ready to get more adventurous in your projects we have some tinker kits available for you which include bread boards, jumper wires, LEDs and more.

• ARDUINO  A000010A000010 KIT WORKSHOP BASE LEVEL  A000010A000010

Customer reviews

• Great price, endless possibilities
  “Got one to build a RFID garage door opener, and ended up with five more UNO boards!! This is so much fun to tinker with, it's addictive. I would wholeheartedly encourage parents to purchase the starter kit for their engineers to be (comes with everything needed to start playing).”
• Another Great Product!
  “The new ATmega8U2 USB chip looks to be a bit faster then the older FTDI chip but its a lot harder to reprogram if needed.
  Other then that I have been using this board for projects for a few months now with no problems.”

Quick links

• Setting up your board
• Great tutorials
• Join the Arduino community
• Having problems? Ask our resident expert Simon Monk
• Join Arduino Discussions
• Visit your local Store: Asia-Pacific  |  Europe  |  USA

Author: Pat kelly