Meet the Arduino IDE and Board
What is the IDE?
IDE stands for "Integrated Development Environment". Sounds pretty daunting, doesn't it? Well, it's not - it's actually really simple and very useful. The Arduino IDE is the application that you use to write sketches for your Arduino. It formats the sketch nicely for you, colour-codes key words so that the sketch is easy to read, and also tells you if you've written something your Arduino won't understand - the Aduino only understands sketches that are written in a very specific way. If you've ever programmed a computer this will make sense to you - if not, don't worry we'll work through the rules together so that you understand exactly what you're doing.
The Arduino IDE
The Arduino Board in more detail
The Arduino boards are essentially physical platforms to support the "brains" - the microcontroller. They make it easy for you to work with the microcontroller by providing ways for you to programme, power and connect things to the microcontroller, in addition to housing various support circuitry and electrical components needed to make the microcontroller work correctly.
The Arduino Board
The Microcontroller:
This is the brains of the board, and is the large microchip you see on most of the boards. This stores your programme logic, and controls the way the board behaves. On the Arduino UNO, this is an Atmel ATMega328P-PU controller.
USB Connector:
Most of the boards will come with a USB connector. This is the first connection that you'll use, and allows you to connect the board to your PC in order to programme it. In Arduino-speak, the programmes that are uploaded onto the boards are called "sketches". As USB ports carry power, this connector is one of two ways to power your board.
Input/Output Pins:
These are the two rows of connectors on either side of the board, and provide an easy way for you to connect inputs (sensors, buttons, etc.) and outputs (LED's, buzzers, motors, etc.) to the board. They are laid out in a way that makes them easy to access, and also allows you to stack other specially designed boards (called shields) on top of the base Arduino - but more on that later.
Power Pins:
These provide power to your projects: 5V or 3.3V (positive) and Ground (negative).
Power Jack:
The centre-pin power connector allows you to power your board using a battery or a plug-in DC power source (often called a wall-wart). You will want to use these power sources once your project is stand-alone and doesn't need to be connected to your PC (particularly useful if the project has wheels!).
On-board LED:
This is a useful LED built into the board that you can control from your sketches.
Support Electronics:
There are a host of other components - power and serial LEDs, ICSP programmer connectors, power-regulation and protection components, crystals, Serial-USB converters, etc. We'll touch on some of these later in the tutorial when we build our own Arduino on a breadboard (yes, we're going to build our own). For now, they aren't really useful to you.
