What Exactly is an Arduino?

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Figure 1-1. An Arduino Uno

Wikipedia states “An Arduino is a single-board microcontroller and a software suite for programming it. The hardware consists of a simple open hardware design for the controller with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board I/O support. The software consists of a standard programming language and the boot loader that runs on the board.

To put that in layman's terms, an Arduino is a tiny computer that you can program to process inputs and outputs between the device and external components you connect to it (see Figure 1-1). The Arduino is what is known as a Physical or Embedded Computing platform, ...

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