ARDUINO

Beginners often get confused when they discover the Arduino project. When looking for the Arduino, they hear and read strange names such as Uno, Duemilanove, Diecimila, LilyPad, or Seeduino. The problem is that there is no such thing as “the Arduino.” A couple of years ago the Arduino team designed a microcontroller board and released it under an open source license. You could buy fully assembled boards in a few electronics shops, but people interested in electronics could also download its schematic1 and build it themselves.


Over the years the Arduino team improved the board’s design and
released several new versions. They usually had Italian names such
as Uno, Duemilanove, or Diecimila, and you can find a list of all boards
that were ever created by the Arduino team online.
on the following page shows a small selection of Arduinos.
They may differ in their appearance, but they have a lot in common,
and you can program them all with the same tools and libraries.
The Arduino team did not only constantly improve the hardware design.
They also invented new designs for special purposes. For example, they
created the Arduino LilyPad to embed a microcontroller board into
textiles. You can use it to build interactiveT-shirts, for example.
In addition to the official boards, you can find countless Arduino clones
on the Web. Everybody is allowed to use and change the original board
design, and many people created their very own version of an Arduinocompatible
board. Among many others, you can find the Freeduino,Seeduino, Boarduino, and the amazing Paperduino,4 an Arduino clone without a printed circuit board. All its parts are attached to an ordinary piece of paper.