First Hand on the Arduino Uno Board

The Arduino Uno board is one of the many Arduino boards and is the most used of them.

The elements you will need to start having fun with the Arduino board comprises:

The Arduino board itself
The Arduino IDE (software)
Some Arduino compatible shields

The Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

The IDE helps write, compile and upload the code to the board. You can download the IDE for free on arduino.cc

The following highlighted icons from left to right allow to respectively compile and upload the code.

The IDE comes with some example projects ready to upload on the board. To access those sketches, simply click on the drop down menu FILE and then on Example

To load a project to the board, you will need to connect the board to your computer via USB.

Related Content: Building an Arduino countdown timer

Arduino Uno Board

The Arduino board is a programmable hardware with input and output pins. it features an 8-bits microcontroller: the ATmega328P.

Technical specifications


Microcontroller	ATmega328P
Operating Voltage	5V
Input Voltage (recommended)	7-12V
Input Voltage (limit)	6-20V
Digital I/O Pins	14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
PWM Digital I/O Pins	6
Analog Input Pins	6
DC Current per I/O Pin	20 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin	50 mA
Flash Memory	32 KB (ATmega328P) of which 0.5 KB used by bootloader
SRAM	2 KB (ATmega328P)
EEPROM	1 KB (ATmega328P)
Clock Speed	16 MHz
Length	68.6 mm
Width	53.4 mm
Weight	25 g

Input/output pins

Analog pins allow analog inputs but they do not allow analog outputs.

Arduino Shield

Most time called daughter boards, they will be needed to help the Arduino board push the boundaries a little further. Let’s say you are working on a project in which you would like to control different DC motors with a single pin, you will then need a Motor Drive Arduino Shield.

Here is how it looks like.

These daughter boards will sit nicely on top of the Arduino Uno board.

Here is an Arduino board with two shields stack on top of it

That’s pretty much it. Playing with Arduino will require you know both how to write some codes (C/C++) and how to wire the board with additional components to help the whole behave in a specific way.

One of the simplest Arduino project is to have the Arduino board power an LED via a resistor and make the LED blink ON and OFF with a specified frequency.