I love Arduinos. They are my goto starting place when I need an electronic interface of any sort.
In the Arduino workshops I teach at our local hackerspace in Longmont, CO, Tinkermill, I always recommend, when staring out, to use an Arduino Uno.
There are lots of different Arduino boards with a variety of sizes, performances, features and costs. Here are some examples.
If there is no strong compelling reason otherwise, the Uno is a great general purpose starting place. One reason is that it is incredibly robust. In all my workshops and projects, I have jet to blow one up accidently. Even my lab assistant, Maxwell, with his 20 kV of static charge, has yet to blow an Uno, as in this example.
When purchasing a commodity part that has many suppliers, I recommend two alternative suppliers, depending on the situation. If you can afford it and if you want it quickly, I recommend purchasing from Sparkfun. Their website is a treasure trove of valuable information, projects and tutorials.
Their version of the Arduino Uno is the RedBoard. While it is $19.95, its worth supporting a great company. For the premium price, you get a part that is guaranteed to work, using reliable parts and can get it in a few days. Here is their board.
But, if you are just starting out and are not sure you want to get involved with Arduinos and want a low cost way of starting out, there is an alternative.
The lowest cost Arduino available can be purchased for less than $4, shipping and the USB cable included.
One reason this Arduino is low cost is that it uses a different chip to talk between the USB port and the UART of the Atmel 328 microcontroller chip. The low cost Chinese Arduino interface chip is the CH340G. Its driver should load automatically in a windows OS, but if it doesn’t, the driver can be downloaded from here.
Once you’re hooked, once you reach the point where you’ve been bitten by the bug and realize this is the coolest gadget since your set of blocks when you were three, you are now part of the maker community.
Contribute back to the community in your own way. Purchase parts from Sparkfun to support their great contributions, donate to the Arduino foundation, or pass your excitement to someone who doesn’t know about these really cool devices.
