High Level Arduino Board Overview

Now, i would like to quickly review the arduino uno board before running our first program. Ok, so let’s start with the arduino brain. The micro-controller is this long black chip that is doing all the hard work meaning running every line in our program and while doing so send and receive analog and digital signals from all kind of external components store information in memory perform calculation and more, almost like your desktop computer cpu.

Next is the power socket for feeding the board with voltage from external power source, like ac to dc adaptor or some battery. When the board is getting power then this on led will light in green provide us indication that we have power to the board. Just above the power socket we have the usb socket that is used to power the board upload programs and monitor the serial port.

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Arduino

The reset button is used to reset the arduino program to start all over again from the first line of code. In some case, we would like our project to have additional reset button to be located in another location. So for that we can use the reset socket for achieving the same goal.

One thing i almost forgot to mention is related to the name of the board. If we look carefully we will see that it is not called “arduino” and if you remembered we learned that many arduino boards are actually compatible boards and not the official boards because the name “arduino” is protected brand name, and this is why we will see some other names being chosen by the specific producer of that board. Still it is functioning like the official boards moving next, let’s review the two rows of sockets. The upper one is the digital input/output sockets that are also called pins starting from 0 to 13, meaning we can connect an external digital device like a digital sensor

In addition, some digital pins are marked with small tilde providing us indication that this specific pins also support pwm, later in this course we will learn how to use the pwm.

In the same row, just after pin 13. We have the ground socket that may be used to provide ground reference to external circuit. That may be used to provide ground reference to external circuit looking on the row below

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Arduino

On the right side we have six analog input pins and please note it is used just for input not output, starting from a0 to a5 moving on in the same raw to the left side, we have all kind of power connectors. The first one is vin, voltage input that can be used to can be used to feed our board with power from an external source without using the dedicated power socket, meaning this dedicated power socket or the usb connector.

Next we have two ground connectors 5v output and 3.3v output that are used to power all kind of external components. There are some additional pins called icsp, this one and this one, and that a little more advanced option we will cover in the next level, not in this course

In the middle of the board, there are some very useful leds, the tx and rx leds are used to indicate that the board is sending or receiving information. So in case we upload a new program to the board, those leds will blink on and off for very short time.

Read More: Everything You Need To Know About Arduino

The last led, over here, called “l” led, and we can turn it on and off using our program for any useful usage. Ok, i think that's summarize the main functionalities, that we have in the arduino uno board. And let's move into the next chapter while creating some simple software and running that on our board.