Arduino robot – A cheap multiplatform that offers an easy programming environment

Nowadays there are technologies that can be used to design autonomous elements connected to devices and to interact with hardware and software. It serves to control an element, like an engine that moves a blind according to the light level inside the room, thanks a sensor attached to a plate or to read a keyboard or a web page and convert the information into an action. If you are a robotic fan to make an Arduino robot now is very simple.

Arduino is a free hardware (HW) platform, based on a board with a microcontroller (MC) and a development environment (IDE). It is designed to facilitate electronic creations in multidisciplinary projects. MCs surround us in our daily lives; they utilize the sensors to listen to the physical world and the actuators to interact with it in a reading-writing process.

This HW includes a plate with an MC that possesses communication ports, allowing the inputs and outputs. On the other hand it provides software (SW) consisting of an IDE that implements the particular programming language (PL), tools to transfer the firmware to the microcontroller and the bootloader executed on the board.

Arduino success depends on the community work

The SW and PL main feature is their simplicity. It is an easy way to make interactive projects including robots for anyone. The procedure is to download and install the IDE, search a bit at Internet and merely “cut and paste” the code that interests you and upload it into your HW. Finally, wire it with the peripherals and you will have the product.

The economic investment is low and only includes the price of the Arduino plate and peripherals. This technology is especially useful to develop devices linked to the network. Its usage is helpful to control anything that can be imagined. It has a fast learning curve with basic knowledge of programming and electronics, which allows creating tasks in different fields.

There is another important factor of this accomplishment, it is the community that supports all this progress, shares discoveries, creates libraries to facilitate the use and publishes their results so they can be replicated, improved or be the basis of diverse related ones.