February 2009
Beginner
128 pages
2h 45m
English
Content preview from Getting Started with ArduinoBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The Software (IDE)
The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a special program running on your computer that allows you to write sketches for the Arduino board in a simple language modeled after the Processing (www.processing.org) language. The magic happens when you press the button that uploads the sketch to the board: the code that you have written is translated into the C language (which is generally quite hard for a beginner to use), and is passed to the avr-gcc compiler, an important piece of open source software that makes the final translation into the language understood by the microcontroller. This last step is quite important, because it's where Arduino makes your life simple by hiding away as much as possible of the complexities of programming microcontrollers.
The programming cycle on Arduino is basically as follows:
Plug your board into a USB port on your computer.
Write a sketch that will bring the board to life.
Upload this sketch to the board through the USB connection and wait a couple of seconds for the board to restart.
The board executes the sketch that you wrote.
Note
NOTE: Installing Arduino on Linux is somewhat complicated at the time of this writing. See www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/Linux for complete instructions.
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