If you want to get started with Arduino, I recommend the official Arduino Starter Kit on arduino.cc. It has all the things you need for basic understanding of electrical circuits and programming the Arduino IDE. Including more than 200 parts and a project book with 15 interesting projects for beginners.
Become a maker!
Understand the mechanics and possibilities behind Arduino and add your creativity. Arduino can be used to control and monitor many things. Interact with the physical world in a new and easy way!
- There is no need to solder
- Very easy to learn
- Very well documented
- Different sized boards
- Different shields to extend the board capabilities
- Many official and third party components available
- Many examples and a huge community
Using a breadboard enables you to plug jumpers in an out without effort.
Choose the right tool!
A short overview of the four most common Ardino boards. Arduino UNO is your choice when starting with Arduino.
The Arduino Mega series works fine for bigger projects. Arduini Mega 1280 is no longer available.
|Arduino UNO||Arduino Mega 1280||Arduino Mega 2560||Arduino Micro|
|Clock Speed||16 MHz||16 MHz||16 MHz||16 MHz|
|Flash Memory||32 KB||128 KB||256 KB||32 KB|
|Digital I/O Pins||14||54||54||20|
|Analog Input Pins||6||16||16||12|
|Length||68.6 mm||101.52 mm||101.52 mm||48 mm|
|Width||53.4 mm||53.3 mm||53.3 mm||18 mm|
Now that you know the hardware specification you can decide which board suits your needs best.
Because I am a webdeveloper I always tend to save data to a MySQL database. That is only possible when the Arduino is connected to the internet. If you got a WiFi network at home you should get an Arduino WiFi Shield.