Nice that you decided to take an interest in the best hobby you will ever know! You'll never stop once you start with Arduino. I have never seen anyone fail at this hobby if they put some effort and imagination.

One board, infinite possibilities.

Let us get down to business and start building.

Arduino is a micro controller board, designed to connect to electronics and control them. We can write code for the Arduino that will get data from the environment, make decisions and take actions based on the data from the environment.

Step 1: Downloading the Arduino Software

Introduction :

The first thing we need is the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE). One of
the best parts about Arduino is that the software in which we need to program the boards is free and open source. The Arduino IDE is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

How to do it :

Follow these simple steps:
1. Visit the Arduino website at http://arduino.cc/.

2. In the main menu, go to the Download section.

3. Select your operating system and download the latest stable release of the Arduino software.

4. After it downloads, install the Arduino software.

More to it :

1. Now that we have the Arduino IDE installed, let's familiarize ourselves with the user interface.

2. In the Sketch tab, we can see all the opened Arduino Sketches. This comes handy when we
want to work on multiple programs at the same time.

3. The Code Space area is where all the magic happens. That's where we write the code
that powers satellites and cat food dispensers. It's a code editor with automatic syntax highlighting and autoarranging.

4. The Status Display area indicates all the bad stuff. Whenever there are errors in the code, they
will be displayed there. It also displays errors in the connection with the board. The only good thing it can display is that the code has been successfully uploaded to the Arduino board.

5. Additional functionality can be found in the main menu bar. Here, we have the classic File
menu where we have Save, Open, Close, and also some examples. In the following recipes, more will be discussed about the menu bar components. A nice trick worth sharing is in the Tools menu—the Auto Format tool will format the code to look professional and clean.

Step 2: Connecting Arduino

The following are the ingredients required for this recipe :

1- An Arduino board connected to the computer via USB.

2- The Arduino IDE downloaded and installed.

The following steps are required for connecting Arduino to Windows :

1. Connect the Arduino to the computer using a USB cable. If everything is properly connected, the green light will turn on and stay on.

2. Windows will begin its driver installation process and fail. Click the Start button and open the Control Panel. There, navigate to System and then Device Manager.

3. In the Device Manager window, search for Ports (COM & LPT) and look for a port with a name similar to your board. For the Arduino Uno, the port should be named Arduino UNO…. If there is no such title under Ports, look in Other Devices for an Unknown Device. That will be your Arduino board.

4. Right-click on the Arduino Board in Device Manager and choose Update Driver Software. Next, select Browse my computer for driver software.

5. This will require the path to the Arduino driver. This can be found in the Arduino installation folder in Program Files, in the drivers folder. It is named Arduino. inf. Select the file and Windows will finish installing the driver.