Arduino Starting

Arduino is an electronic prototyping platform of hardware and software.
More information about Arduino can be found at the Arduino web site.

Hardware

There are many versions of Arduino board and a list of Arduino boards is available at arduino.cc/en/Main/Hardware.

Arduino board

The most popular Arduino basic board in 2009 is the Arduino Duemilanove. A detailed description of the broad is summarized on
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove .

Some Arduino Duemilanove reference:

EAGLE files:
http://arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/arduino-duemilanove-reference-design.zip

Schematic:
http://arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/arduino-duemilanove-schematic.pdf

Pin mapping for ATmega168 chip:
http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/PinMapping168

MCU Chip

The microcontroller of the board is ATmeag168 and ATmega328 can also be used when more memory capacity is needed.

ATmega168 Data sheet:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc2545.pdf

ATmega328 Data sheet:
http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc8161.pdf

USB cable

A standard 'A plug' to 'B plug' USB cable is needed to connect the computer and the Arduino Duemilanove board. With the rectangular USB A plug connects to the computer and the square USB B plug connects to the Arduino.

Software

The software needed are the integrated Arduino development environment and the USB drivers.

Integrated Development Environment, IDE

The open-source Arduino development environment can be downloaded from http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software according to the operating system.

No installation is needed for the Arduino software. Unzip the software files from the zipped file,  http://arduino.googlecode.com/files/arduino-0018.zip to a folder and double-click arduino.exe to start the application for writing code and programming the Arduino board.

Drivers

The USB drivers can be found in the drivers/FTDI USB Drivers folder under the Arduino folder. Or the most updated drivers can be downloaded from http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/D2XX.htm of ftdichip.com. The installation of USB drivers allows the computer to communicate wtih the Arduino board.