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Arduino is an inexpensive microprocessor development board designed for educational purposes. It's the first Wiring compatible development board that is able to be easily assembled by hand. It was created alongside Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, and David Mellis at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea as a furtherment of the excellent Wiring project by Hernando Barragán.
Inexpensive Hardware
Before someone can begin using Wiring, they must have a Wiring compatible development board. The original Wiring board is one of the most powerful and full featured development boards of its kind. However, it is difficult for beginners to assemble by hand. By compromising some features, the Arduino board is less expensive and easily assembled by hand. This provides a cheap and easy way to get started with Wiring and learning how to assemble circuits. Arduino also serves as a stepping stone towards understanding the benefits offered by more powerful Wiring development boards.
Open Software
The Arduino board, using a different microprocessor than the original Wiring board, requires specialized software. This software, released as a plug-in to Wiring, enables the capabilities of the Arduino's microprocessor to be utilized within Wiring. Since Wiring was designed to be as similar to Processing as possible, it has a similar licensing model. Including freely available atmel avr build tools, Processing's cross-platform IDE, and a number of other open-source libraries, Wiring's source code will be released open-source in the near future.
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Availability
Information related to the availability of Arduino will first be announced on the official Arduino site. All necessary CAD files and schematics required to produce and assemble a serial or USB Arduino circuit board are available now. The software is also currently available as a Wiring plug-in. At this time (August 2005) the bluetooth Arduino is still in development.
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