Arduino Internals

Room for Expansion

By itself, the Arduino I/O Board doesn’t do much at all. It’s possible to have a semi-intelligent conversation with it over the serial port, if you’re willing to stretch the definitions of the words conversation, intelligent, and possible. For more useful and practical applications that can actually be accomplished today, let’s take a look at the provisions that have been made to extend the reach of the humble Arduino.

Even the earliest Arduino prototypes had some sort of expansion headers installed. The basic idea of the Arduino was to incorporate a generic microcontroller and its associated circuitry onto a standard form-factor device, to prevent unnecessary reinventing of the wheel each and every time a project required ...