Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. Arduino started in 2005 as a project for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.
Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased pre assembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.
There are so many different boards. But few boards are commonly use. We can select boards according to our project. These are the commonly use boards.
- Arduino Uno
- Arduino Mega ADK
- Arduino Mega 2560
- Arduino Nano
- Arduino Leonardo ect.
The special thing is there are so many arduino compatible Shields for these bords. There are libraries for this Shields. So that we can simply use these libraries and programme arduino. Some of the Shields are
- Arduino GSM Shield
- Arduino Ethernet Shield
- Arduino WiFi Shield
- Arduino Wireless SD Shield
- Arduino Motor Shield
- Arduino Wireless Proto Shield
- Arduino Proto Shield etc.
Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).
http://arduino.cc/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino
The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment.