To answer this question, we must first review the development of Arduino. In 2005, Massimo Banzi, a teacher of a high-tech design school in ivrea, Italy, designed the original Arduino circuit board in cooperation with David Attuyer, a Spanish chip engineer who was a visiting scholar in this school, in order to provide students with a cheap and easy-to-use microcontroller platform. Then Arduino became popular in Europe, and gradually spread the spring breeze to the United States, Japan, Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong and other regions, especially in Chinese mainland in recent one or two years.

Arduino's unique advantages are as follows:

Openness: Arduino's hardware circuit software development environment is completely open source, and anyone can use, modify and distribute it without commercial use. In this way, users can not only better understand the circuit principle of Arduino, but also modify it according to their own needs. For example, due to the limitation of space, it is necessary to design special-shaped circuit boards; Or design your own expansion circuit together with the main control circuit.

Ease of use: the first simple program should be able to run successfully within one hour after getting Arduino, regardless of the foundation, as long as he is interested. The connection between Arduino and PC adopts the most mainstream USB connection at present. You can connect Arduino directly to your computer like an MP3 player without installing any additional drivers. And Arduino's development environment software is also very simple. A clear menu only provides the most needed toolbars, except for all the elements that may dazzle beginners. You can even compile and download the code without reading the manual (I didn't say write).

Communication: For beginners, communication and demonstration are very exciting ways to learn. But sometimes, you use AVR for car tracking, and I use PIC for car tracking. So for beginners who don't have a deep understanding of single chip microcomputer, I'm afraid there will be some difficulties in communication. Arduino defines a relatively unified framework, some bottom initialization methods are unified, and the ports for digital signals and analog signals have also been calibrated, which is very convenient for beginners to use AC circuits or programs.

Rich third-party resources: Arduino is all open source, whether it is hardware or software. You can deeply understand all the underlying mechanisms and reserve a very friendly third-party library development interface. Adhering to the openness and sharing of the open source community, many fans will share their hardware and software after successfully implementing their own designs. For latecomers, you can easily find some basic functional modules you want to use in Arduino community: steering gear control, PID speed regulation, A/D conversion and so on. In particular, some module suppliers have begun to pay more and more attention to the Arduino community, and will provide their own products with libraries under Arduino, which greatly facilitates Arduino developers and allows you to focus more on the functional design you want, rather than sticking to the compilation of some basic functions.

Yes, Arduino is not the first choice from the technical point of view of embedded development. In order to take care of beginners and even amateurs in electronic development as much as possible, Arduino has customized many bottom designs, which is one of the reasons why many experienced embedded designers scoff at Arduino. Looking back at the advantages of Arduino listed above, where is Arduino positioned?

Arduino was born for the research of embedded development, but today, Arduino has gone far beyond the field of embedded development. Arduino is called "the art of science and technology" in Taiwan Province province. Many fans outside the field of electronic science and technology, with their rich imagination and creativity, have also designed and developed many interesting works.

In Chinese mainland, Arduino appears more as an embedded learning and development tool, but its charm is not limited to this. It can be used as a new "toy" or even a new artistic carrier to attract more people from all fields to join Arduino's magical world.