Arduino

Arduino is the world’s leading open-source hardware and software ecosystem. The Company offers 
a range of software tools, hardware platforms and documentation enabling almost anybody to be creative with technology.

Arduino is a popular tool for IoT product development as well as one of the most successful tools for STEM/STEAM education. Hundreds of thousands designers, engineers, students, developers and Makers around the world are using Arduino to innovate in music, games, toys, smart homes, farming, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Originally started as a research project by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, and David Mellis at the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea in the early 2000’s it builds upon the Processing project, a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts developed by Casey Reas and Ben Fry as well as a thesis project by Hernando Barragan about the Wiring board.

The first Arduino board was introduced in 2005 to help design students — who had no previous experience in electronics or microcontroller programming — to create working prototype connecting the physical world to the digital world. Since then it went to become the most popular electronics prototyping tool used by engineers and even large corporations.

Arduino is the first widespread Open Source Hardware project and was setup to build a community that could help out spread the use of the tool and benefit from contributions from hundreds of people who helped debug the code, write examples , create tutorials, supports other users on the forums and build thousands of groups around the globe. We are eternally grateful for being supported by such an amazing community.

Since Arduino project’s foundation many new development boards and software libraries have been introduced, expanding the range of possibilities available to the community. Today, more than a decade later, Arduino continues to provide open source hardware and software to bring new ideas to life. The openness and ease-of-use of the project lead to mass adoption of microcontroller-based electronics projects and was a catalyst in the creation of the Maker Movement.

Because of its openness, flexibility, ease of use, and affordability, Arduino has become the number one choice for electronics Makers, especially for developing solutions for the IoT marketplace, which
 has been predicted to become a $6 trillion market by 2021.

Want to get started? Let us know how we can help. In addition to our own experts, Arduino has an ecosystem of millions of Makers – and we’re growing fast.

(Source: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/AboutUs)

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Arduino is a hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures computer open-source hardware, open-source software, and microcontroller-based kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control physical devices.
The project is based on microcontroller board designs, produced by several vendors, using various microcontrollers. These systems provide sets of digital and analog I/O pins that can interface to various expansion boards (termed shields) and other circuits. The boards feature serial communication interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, for loading programs from personal computers. For programming the microcontrollers, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on a programming language named Processing, which also supports the languages C and C++.
The first Arduino was introduced in 2005, aiming to provide a low cost, easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. Common examples of such devices intended for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats, and motion detectors.
Arduino boards are available commercially in preassembled form, or as do-it-yourself kits. The hardware design specifications are openly available, allowing the Arduino boards to be produced by anyone. Adafruit Industries estimated in mid-2011 that over 300,000 official Arduinos had been commercially produced, and in 2013 that 700,000 official boards were in users' hands.

(Source: Wikipedia.org)