Conclusion

Before the Arduino project was started in 2005, students in Italy had to pay $100 for a microcontroller called “BASIC Stamp.” The inventor of the Arduino wanted something that would fit into a student’s budget, so the main guideline was to build something similar but for no more than $30. Today, an Arduino Uno board costs around $25 and there are 10 or more commercially available variants of the Arduino Board, and probably millions of Arduino boards and their variants are in facilities all over the world.

We can find Arduino boards in homes and they are used for various kinds of projects from home automation to home security or even brewing a beer. Arduino was launched into space with project ArduSat, and students all over the world can make experiments with it. It is even used at CERN LHC in the equipment that was used to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson.

The possibilities to use the Arduino are literally infinite. There are billions of people around the world and a fair amount of them have probably, at some point in their lives, imagined a device not available on the market or a device that was too expensive that could help them in some aspect of their lives. I was always interested in electronics, but I didn’t have years to learn all there is about them just so that I could build stuff that was interesting to me.

At one point, there were a lot of posts on forums and articles on blogs so I thought perhaps it’s time to buy one. Not much had changed when the Arduino UNO board arrived. It collected dust for almost a year and that is a very long time by today’s standards. Actually, just looking at the board scared me; all I could think of is all those books on electronics with so much detailed information! Then, one evening, carefully following the online tutorials, I started to work with it. By the end of the evening, I was amazed at how easy it all was. In one single evening, I did more than with all of the information I gathered before in the literature. It is incredible how easy it is to start with the electronics if you use the Arduino Board, and how much is abstracted from you if you use it. In essence, those were the humble beginnings that led to my writing of this book.

If you followed along up until now, I hope you enjoyed the materials in the book and that you are going to use it to build things that you always wanted to build but didn’t have the tools before to do so. Arduino technology really makes dreams come true and the imagination come to life. Massimo Banzi, one of the Arduino inventors, once said that Arduino is open-sourcing imagination. Don’t stop dreaming your dreams, and remember, you now have a powerful tool in your toolbox to help you pursue them.