The Basics™

This section will cover the very basic concepts required for your Arduino to start interfacing with the outside world. But first: what is a microcontroller?

Microcontrollers

As mentioned previously, Arduinos are a family of microcontrollers released by the Arduino coorporation. A microcontrollers (or MCU for short) is a tiny computer. Unlike regular computers, MCUs have been designed to only have the bare necessities, making them much weaker in terms of overall performance.

However, performance is relative; although they can't open up browser windows, their barebones hardware implementation allows them to respond and interact with the outside world extremely quickly. As such, MCUs are commonly deployed in parts of systems where timing is crucical: robot movement systems, real-time sensor data processing, high-throughput communication (routers, network switches) and etc.

The bonus of having less hardware? MCUs are cheap.