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Hardware & devices

Arduino

An open-source ecosystem of microcontroller boards, a simplified C++ programming environment and libraries that lowered the barrier to building embedded devices.

Arduino began as a teaching tool and became the most recognizable development board family in electronics. Its contribution was less the hardware than the model: a board, a USB cable, a free IDE and a “sketch” with setup and loop functions that hides register-level detail behind calls such as digitalRead and analogWrite. Thousands of libraries cover sensors, displays and radios, and the same API now runs on third-party chips including the ESP32.

For IoT, Arduino is a prototyping and education platform first. Its boards range from simple 8-bit models to Wi-Fi and cellular variants and industrial-rated controllers. The trade-off of the simplified environment is that it hides timing, power management and memory behavior that production firmware needs to control, so many teams prototype in Arduino and then move to a vendor SDK or an RTOS.

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