Tiny Arduino Boards

Arduino is family of tiny single-board computers. The Arduino hardware platform is red-hot, and for good reasons. It's flexible, it's open, and it's friendly to beginners. The hardware is open, with freely available specs and CAD files. The Arduino programming language and libraries are open, licensed under the GPL and LGPL. All documentation is open, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Arduinos are used in myriad projects: robots, music devices, race cars, games, little airplanes, greenhouse monitors and controllers, clothing with blinky light animations, animated signage, burglar alarms, deer-scaring devices, and all kinds of imaginative devices.

Arduino boards are inexpensive, ranging from around $25 to $80. Arduinos are powered by 8-bit Atmel ATmega single-chip AVR microcontrollers. These are modified RISC controllers that use on-chip Flash memory for storage, so you can write and load different programs and have all kinds of fun.

Accessories like audio boards, motion sensors, LEDs, little electric motors, little speakers, pushbuttons, resistors, and power supplies are also inexpensive. A couple of hundred dollars buys everything you need for building a whole lot of projects, including a good-quality soldering iron, grounding straps and mats, and a good multi-meter. Why not go nuts and build your own multimeter, because you can.

If you have old PCs and other electronics lying around, chances are you have a lot of salvageable parts. You can also build an Arduino board by hand, using the downloadable schematic and diagrams. Another way is to use a breadboard, where you plug in your various components instead of etching a printed circuit board (PCB). It's a fast and fairly easy way to learn about the different pieces that go into an embedded board. Arduinos are built in Italy by SmartProjects, and by SparkFun Electronics and Gravitech in the US.

Arduinos come in a range of forms and functionality. The LilyPad Arduino is disc-shaped and flexible for sewing into garments. The Mini is super-small, the Ethernet Shield provides networking, and the Uno is a complete board with enough functionality to power a lot of projects without major modifications. The Uno is the current reference model for the Arduino platform. When you want a good general-purpose board that's ready to go, get the Uno; it connects to your PC via USB for both programming and power.