What is the difference between Arduino and microcontrollers!
So we are going to talk about the difference between Arduino and microcontrollers..
What is Arduino??????
– is a ‘development boards ’ depends on members of the Atmel AVR microcontroller family (and in more recent years, other brands & models of microcontrollers too), that had been long before knewing how to pronounce Arduino.
Also, Arduino is a growing list of libraries, for controlling a large range of chip peripherals, and performing a wide range of functions, that allows the user to focus most of their effort on their primary (application/goal), rather than ‘boring’ things.
And Arduino is also a rather awful but nonetheless good-enough IDE for writing Arduino ‘sketches’ in, which contains and hides most of the dirty underbelly of the toolchain of compiler and linker and uploader that so far Arduino, was and remains a pain to set up.
Arduino is not a language
Arduino sketches are C-language, and under the hood/bonnet Arduino is implemented with C++ and one can actually program one’s sketches in C++ too, should the need arise. All microcontrollers can be programmed in Assembler, for the very rare occasions that are necessary, but nowadays most can also be programmed in C/C++ and a few in other higher-level languages too.
Arduino also has a very huge community of mostly neophyte users, similarly to Raspberry Pi. Other brands and families of microcontroller tend to have smaller communities of helpful co-support and tend to consist of more experienced practitioners from the traditional engineering disciplines, rather than newcomers.
Arduino was a way to bring the world of microcontrollers to a broader audience and still , originally intended to be artists wishing to make ‘technical art’, with reducing the ‘barriers to entry’ expected of the world of microcontrollers. It succeeded in that goal, wildly, and changed the landscape of electronics engineering as applied to microcontrollers, demystifying that which used to be arcane, expensive, and slow to develop useful applications.
Arduino is not a microcontroller. It is based on an AVR controller, but its more than for the below points:
- It is a full system. It has an MCU, an onboard programmer which means you don’t need an external programmer, and a bootloader software that can talk with your machine.
- It comes with an IDE. Actually, you can program an Arduino board without its IDE, but that will need you a lot of configurations (chip family, rom size, and ram mapping). So , it gives a facility for easy programming. Good for beginners.
- It has a full ecosystem. You can easily get an Arduino with a compatible board from the market . You can download drivers and libraries for a huge quantity of devices you ‘ll possibly use in your project.
- One issue of Arduino, however, it has the poor ability to debug, which is essential for debugging complex programs. The only way you can debug it using the serial terminal and that is very inefficient.
The Arduino was successful more than the previous microcontrollers for a variety of reasons:
- Arduino was an complete improvment board, including programmer. When you wrote code for it, you didn’t need a separate gadget to program . You can hook it to your Windows/Mac/Linux box, and download code directly to it, and then test it. It didn’t require any mechanical or electronic assembly.
- Arduino was reasonably inexpensive. At first , Arduino boards were around $30, which placed them in the range of hobbyists. Now, you can get knock-off clones for ( 3-5) $ from China country.
- Arduino was programmed withC/C++ language by using the free GCC C compiler. Most other microcontrollers of the day were programmed with proprietary (and often expensive) compilers. The Arduino environment was designed to be a solo download and is reasonably portable.
- Arduino provided a fairly rich group of libraries to melt the cognitive load for the beginner. Libraries make it simple to do serial I/O, access I2C peripherals, an interface to a fairly wide variety of other devices.
- The Arduino built up a community that shares code and experience with each other. this community is almost the biggest asset of the Arduino ecosystem.
It all comes down to the support and your choice
Arduino has proved so popular that the libraries and environment have been ported to other microcontroller boards and architectures such as ARM-based boards or boards based upon the ESP8266 chipset. It’s possible to move from the classic boards to these newer, more powerful and less expensive boards with relatively little effort.
Microcontroller development board in that time was not intended to be friendly for beginners. It was aimed to be used by electronic students or engineers who want to build real-world industrial-grade device.
Massimo Banzi was a teacher, and he wanted his students to learn electronics, not by doing a tedious task like soldering or something like that. But instead, he wanted them to focus on constructing algorithms. So he built Arduino.
In brief, Arduino was launched with a purpose: to simplify (digital) electronics development cycle. Arduino is equipped with its own environment (IDE, language, forums) so it can be used even by a toddler (remember Sylvia the Arduino little girl?).
Even though Atmel built a very complex development board for their chips.
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