The first, and most popular member of the Arduino family of boards is the Uno. If you are just starting out, and even if you are experienced, but want a good general purpose, low cost Arduino board, you should have at least one Uno board on your shelf.
I use this board for all the beginning Arduino workshops I teach and I always have a few of these board lying around. A number of the projects I’ve written about in Nuts and Volts Magazine use an Uno.
If you work on other, more advanced projects, like data acquisition, IoT and robots or home automation, you may want to consider other boards or modules, like the Sparkfun RedBoard Turbo.
Purchase Your First Uno from Sparkfun
If you are new to Arduinos, I recommend purchasing your first Uno from Sparkfun. Their version of the Uno is the Redboard. You are pretty much guaranteed it will work out of the box, their design is very robust and they have a great getting started and troubleshooting guide on their web site. It will cost $14.95, but it is worth it for your first board.
I use the Uno in the Arduino workshops I teach at Tinkermill. I’ve had more than 300 inexperienced users play with the same 12 Uno boards and we’ve never had a failure. My cat, Maxwell, is an expert ESD tester and he has crawled over and slept on every Redboard I’ve used, and they survived with no problems. I can’t say the same for other suppliers’ boards.
Purchase $3 Unos on AliExpress
Once you have a redboard and want to buy some extras, I recommend getting a cheap one. While you can find one on Amazon for about $8 and sometimes on eBay for $4, I find the lowest cost Arduino Unos can often be found on Aliexpress.
Here is the lowest cost Arduino I’ve found, for less than $3, shipping is free.
If you try somewhere else, be sure the Arduino package comes with the USB cable, if you need one. If you don’t need a USB cable, you can find an Uno for as low as $2.50.
Test Your Board to Verify it is Working
Once you receive your Arduino, you should plug in the USB cable, make sure the power LED is lit. Sometimes the Blink sketch comes uploaded on the Uno, so you will see the LED near pin 13 blinking off and on once every 2 seconds.
To test that you are able to communicate with your new Uno, open Blink from File/example/Basic/blink. After you press the upload button, If the code compiles and uploads with no errors, this is a good sign. You should see the on-board LED near pin 13 blinking once every two seconds.
As a good consistency test, just to make sure you are not seeing the already loaded blink program running, you should change the delay from 1000 msec to 100 msec in both instances of delay(). Then upload and you should see the LED blink much faster. If you are successful, you have a functioning Uno.
For information on getting started using your Uno, check out my video eBook, Arduinos without Tears on Amazon.com.
