More than ten years ago, in a bar in a small Italian town, a group of students and researchers created a low-cost microcontroller that would revolutionize the world of DIY (Do It Yourself)—Arduino, shown in the next image:
The latest version of Ardunio (or Genuino, for the non-USA market) is called Arduino UNO. Uno means one in Italian and this codename celebrates the first stable version of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that comes with the board itself. This board is based on ATmega328P by Atmel and provides a set of controllable input/output pins. It can work as a standalone microcontroller, once it has been properly programmed, and can be used via its USB connection.
The greatest feature of Arduino is its open nature: everything, from the hardware schematics to the development IDE, has been open source since day one. This openness, and the extensible design of the board, allowed manufactures and advanced users to create an infinite number of so-called shields...
