The Arduino Uno Microcontroller

It might surprise you when you learn that the most time spent in modern electronics today is on programming! As much as 80% of the time is spent programming your project. 

The microcontroller and what it consists of is thus very important, as you will spend most of your time working on it.

 In a nutshell, a microcontroller consists of many pins. As you can see in the picture below, we will be using the Arduino Uno microcontroller. There are hundreds of other controllers, some with fewer pins and some with many more. 

Some pins power the microcontroller, but most of these are called GIO (General Input Output) pins. These pins can read voltage (that's input) and/or supply a voltage (output). 

The basic idea is to write programs that will control these pins. A simple yet powerful example is a button controlling a LED light. When the button is pressed, it will supply voltage to a pin on the microcontroller. You can monitor that pin using programming, and once a voltage is detected on that pin, you can further program the microcontroller to place a voltage on another pin. If that pin has, for example, an LED connected to it, the LED will light up. 

In these lessons, you will learn that these input and output pins can have different functions so that you can connect different sensors etc. to them.

As we go along in this course you will learn in much more details about the Arduino Uno. The real "star of the show" is the IC shown below, this is the CPU (central processing unit) that does all the work and where your program is stored

The below 2 pdf's are important to be able to move forward, Please get to know the material, as all coding and schematics will be based on this.

You might be surprised at the number of different types of Arduino boards that are available. Here is a link to the official Arduino product range.