A good part of the beauty of the Arduino is its simplicity. The software is pretty simple, and the hardware is simple. In fact, you can create your own with just a small handful of components.
An Arduino breadboard kit:
- One solderless breadboard
- An Atmega328P microcontroller, pre-programmed with the Arduino bootloader
- Two LEDs; one red and one yellow
- Four resistors; two 330 – 680 ohm, one 10K ohm, and one 1M ohm
- Five capacitors; two 18 pf, two 0.1 uf, and one 1 uf
- One 16 MHz crystal
- One push-button switch (normally open)
- Some 24-gauge solid hookup wire (ideally, red, black, and a few other colors)
You’ll, of course, also need wire and cutters and strippers. Now, to put it all together, watch this video.
You can’t program it yet. That will come next time. The basic schematic follows:
