In my previous post I blogged how I had purchased an Arduino Uno, shown below, I’ll now give you a quick intro on the setup.

First of all you will need a USB cable, this isn’t included with the Arduino Uno, unless you purchase a kit which includes the Uno and other components. The USB cable needs to be  a USB A-Male to a USB B-Male.  I’ve attached a screen shot of this below:

USB cable

You can see the USB port (and power) on the Arduino below:

USB port

I plugged this in before downloading the development environment and it lit up straight away (the board runs on USB power, as well as a standard power cable which also isn’t included).

Arduino plugged in

Next you will need to download the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment). This can be found here. There is a version for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and for those of you who wish to compile the IDE yourself, the source code.

Once you have followed the process to set up the Arduino IDE then you should be good to go. You can also find a quick guide to the IDE toolbar here.

I experimented with a few of the test applications that can be found in the IDE  to get the hang of things. A list of this examples can be found on the Arduino site here. Also the language reference guide can be found here. And yes the Arduino language even includes a goto statement which I am sure has caused no end of debates online!

So that’s it, an incredibly easy piece of hardware to get setup.

My next step is going to be exploring the Arduino programming language.