Arduino Hardware and Software Overview
Arduino Hardware and Software Overview
1.1.- Hardware
The hardware consists of the electronic and physical components of the Arduino board. Among them
1.1.1.- Microcontroller
The microcontroller is the programmable electronic device on the Arduino board, it is
to say, that executes a program for which we have previously written its instructions to
that I carry out a task autonomously.
The microcontroller has input/output pins that are responsible for
communicate with the outside. We can connect sensors to the input terminals
to receive data from the outside, and on the output pins we can connect actuators
to send commands and interact with the physical environment.
1.1.2.- Digital I/O
The digital input/output pins are the ones that work with binary values: "1"
corresponds to 5V and '0' corresponds to 0V.
The Arduino board has 14 pins configurable as digital input or output that
operate at 0 or 5 volts. Each pin can provide or receive a maximum of
current 40 mA. It is possible to expand 6 more digital pins using the pins of the
analog inputs as digital.
1.1.5.- Communications
The Arduino board has ways to communicate with other devices, the most
serial communication used through the USB connector.
The connection between the Arduino board and the PC using the USB port creates a connection.
virtual series associated with a communication port of the PC that allows us to load
the programs with the IDE. We can also use this serial connection to receive and
send data to the programs running on the Arduino board via the
monitor series of the programming environment.
1.2.- Software
The software is the logical part of the Arduino board with which we write, verify and
We load the program we want to execute into the microcontroller's memory.
The programs that we load onto the Arduino board are written and verified in a
computer application that we install on our PC called IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
Arduino development environment. This environment or programming interface is
multiplatform(windows, linux, mac)and communicates with the Arduino board through
a USB port.
With the program (software) loaded in the memory of the microcontroller and the
electronic components (hardware) connected to the Arduino board we have made
our project. We can execute the project independently,
disconnecting the USB cable from the PC, if we connect an external power supply
the battery pack or run it with the USB cable connected to the PC without the need for