Arduino Blinky LED Intro

           One of the easier 'get up and go' microcontroller platforms is known as the Arduino. The much hyped Arduino uses a specific serial bootloader that connects to your PC or MAC through a Serial-to-USB converter so that your PC/MAC can easily talk to it and upload your new program.
           In this article we will take a look at a standard Arduino, understand what's necessary for building small programs for it, use an example program and modify it to get a feeling for the basics. This article is meant for anyone who just purchased an Arduino and wants to get started with it, so no Arduino robots this time around!

Arduino Blinky LED Intro - Demonstration

Arduino Blinky LED Intro - Setup

Purpose & Overview of this project
           The goal of this article is to get a laptop setup so that it can be used for development of Atmel AVR microcontrollers, using the Arduino platform. The folks at Arduino promise that getting started with Arduino is a piece of cake, so this article should be simple to follow along with to get started with microcontrollers.
           The particular purposes of this article is to get the arduino IDE installed and running, to be able to communicate and upload programs to the Arduino and to get a simple LED blinking program working which proves we can both upload programs to the Arduino and control timing pauses to the milisecond.