Projects, How-to, and more!
Ok, so basically everybody has heard of microcontrollers. The main difference between microprocessors and microcontrollers is that microcontrollers provide some amount of RAM, some Flash memory to store your program and easy I/O (microprocessors require a driver chip that provides parallel/serial out). Flash memory is just like the memory on USB drives. It can be easily changed.
The Arduino is a development board for the AVR Atmega8/168/328. You can download the free IDE and that allows you to program the chip in a C variant. The IDE is very simple to use and to send code to your Arduino, all that's needed to do is connect a USB cable(the kind that's on your printer, any length is fine), and click the Upload icon on the IDE. You should see the TX/RX leds flickering wildly and then "Done Uploading" on the IDE message monitor.
Now I would suggest downloading the Processing language environment, too. Processing is a language for art, media and more. You can send data from your Arduino to Processing and it can manipulate it in different ways.
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