which is why we will use it with the Arduino in this book. What is the Arduino? The Arduino is a very customizable microcontroller used by hobbyists and engineers alike. Also, it is open source, which means that the source code is available to you for your programming needs; the integrated development environment (IDE) (where you will be writing your software) is free, and most the resources you can find are open source. The only thing you have to buy is the Arduino microcontroller itself. The Arduino is supported very well on the Web and in books, which makes it very easy to research how-to.
