I am a first year ECE student and I recently came across microcontroller boards while I was searching for good ideas for my academic project. I came to know that we will be taught a course on microcontroller during the subsequent years of our engineering curriculum but it caught my attention much sooner and I decided to explore it during my winter breaks. My initial research took me to Arduino UNO microcontroller board which is easy to use and easy to learn microcontroller board so I decided to buy one and my journey began. Through this article I wish to share my first experience working on microcontroller & building embedded systems using it.

Arduino UNO has a lot to offer. It has a microcontroller ICs on it which can be programmed through a USB cable connecting the board to a PC. Anybody with a very basic understanding of programming language C or C++ can easily get started on it. In order to interact with Arduino we must have an Arduino IDE installed in our laptop on which we write our code, compile it and upload it on Arduino UNO via USB. This is a picture of my new friend – Arduino UNO.

An Arduino user must also have some fundamental understanding of electronics and electronic components like resisters, capacitors, diodes, LEDs etc. Arduino has an online community that is very responsive, so if you get stuck somewhere the online community is there to help you out. There are tons of tutorials, video lectures available to get you started. To get a head-start visit official Arduino website (https://www.arduino.cc), there you will find basic C codes for arduino and circuit diagrams. After understanding them, you can start writing your own code and build your own stuff.

Arduino Starter Kit includes some LED’s, a potentiometer, couple of resistors, diodes, switches, lots of jumper cables, and a breadboard. Practically everything to kick start. I did some small projects like playing with several combinations of LEDs blinking (multiple colors), temperature measurement using thermistor and displaying the results on 16X2 LCD. There are many arduino advanced kits that are available with different sensors like pressure, humidity, accelerometer, gyroscope, light etc. So one can easily measure any physical quantity using these sensors, do the processing on arduino and display the digital results on LCD.

Arduino Starter Kit

It took me just a week or two to understand all this and got me started building my own stuff. So I can safely say that for the beginner, Arduino is one of the best platforms available. One can do large number of projects, developments using Arduino. I have enjoyed working with Arduino so far. I have done Digital input/output programming and Analog I/O. Currently I am doing serial communication, later I plan to do wireless communication. All this using my Arduino UNO and it is quite fascinating. After arduino there are many advanced boards that are available in the market which are more suitable for high end applications. A few examples are – Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison, Beaglebone etc.

By Ajay Rajan – ECE, First Year, Chitkara University H.P.