Next Step-The Arduino board

The Arduino Board is a quite famous microcontroller board in recent times , much because of the simplicity and ease with which we can program it in several HIGH-LEVEL languages,also it is open-source . It accompanies many useful header files and sample code for example projects .Well as starters we needed such a board which could help us more than we could do to it and Arduino looked the best choice.Arduino is easily available in the market with different variants employing atmega 8,168 or 328, but whats the point of buying an open-source device, hence we planned to build it on our own, that way we could understand both the architecture and the pin configuration.The board contains two important blocks , a Usb to Uart converter and the atmega controller with few passive components.

                                                                 Usb to Uart (FT232RL)

                                                                      Atmega168
                                          
The arduino software is pretty impressive and lend a helping hand to its user.It contains both sample code and description of  'starter' projects ,hence for the first few projects u don't have to code anything .Just follow the description and enjoy doing the projects.
K time for a spoiler.In the next few post you will see the preliminary projects we did .As for the first project,its going to be the 'Hello World' of the electronics world :The blinking led. :).
For details about the Arduino board please comment