So this week I got an Arduino board and played with one for the first time. While I’m not new to microprocessors, I am new to Arduino. The board and the development environment are really easy to use, and it shows with the speed something simple can be produced with little knowledge. Just take a look at the LCD screen I got working in just a few minutes. Normally I would have to read a datasheet and interface to the LCD the hard way, but someone has already written a library for it and saved me a ton of time.

The Arduino environment comes with a ton of premade functions do to anything from analog to digital conversion, SD card operations, making an LCD work, and a ton of other things.

The Arduino is based on an AVR processor and runs at 16mhz. While its fast to do a lot of simple project work, its not so fast when it needs to process lots data. Hopefully Arduino comes out with something much more powerful such as an Xmega or Arm based board.