Arduino Hardware overview

             
Arduino Hardware Overview

  There are many variations in arduino board  available in market like:-

Arduino Cable

• LilyPad Arduino Board.
• RedBoard Arduino Board.
• Arduino Mega (R3) Board.
• Arduino Leonardo Board.
• Arduino Shield
• Arduino Uno (R3)  
• In our India on online sites like Flipkart and Amazon ,we can never be sure whether the board is genuine or not ,so better look at ratings and reviews of the product and then try to buy it .A normal-working Arduino Uno board costs nearly 600-800 rupees from these sites but the original costs nearly 1300 rupees,but in world of open-source we can never be sure which is original and which is fake.
  

  

  Arduino hardware with named-componentff

  From the above pics we can see that different parts in an Arduino board:-
• USB JACK-It is the plugging point for Arduino,through which programmes are feed into hardware or it is also used as source-power for Arduino.
• Power jack-It is the ultimate point in Arduino-board to power the board through 9 or 12v battery.
• power pins:-
• GND : Short for ‘Ground’. There are several GND pins on the Arduino, any of which can be used to ground your circuit.
• 5V & 3.3V : As you might guess, the 5V pin supplies 5 volts of power, and the 3.3V pin supplies 3.3 volts of power. Most of the simple components used with the Arduino run happily off of 5 or 3.3 volts.
• PWM: You may have noticed the tilde (~) next to some of the digital pins (3, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11 on the UNO). These pins act as normal digital pins, but can also be used for something called Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM).
• AREF : Stands for Analog Reference. Most of the time you can leave this pin alone. It is sometimes used to set an external reference voltage (between 0 and 5 Volts) as the upper limit for the analog input pins.
• Digital: Across from the analog pins are the digital pins (0 through 13 on the UNO). These pins can be used for both digital input (like telling if a button is pushed) and digital output (like powering an LED).
• Analog : The area of pins under the ‘Analog In’ label (A0 through A5 on the UNO) are Analog In pins. These pins can read the signal from an analog sensor (like a temperature sensor) and convert it into a digital value that we can read.
• Microcontroller-The black thing with all the metal legs is an IC, or Integrated Circuit . Think of it as the brains of our Arduino. The main IC on the Arduino is slightly different from board type to board type, but is usually from the ATmega line of IC ’s from the ATMEL company. This can be important, as you may need to know the IC type (along with your board type) before loading up a new program from the Arduino software. This information can usually be found in writing on the top side of the IC. If you want to know more about the difference between various IC ’s, reading the datasheets is often a good idea.
•  Voltage regulator-The voltage regulator does exactly what it says – it controls the amount of voltage that is let into the Arduino board. Think of it as a kind of gatekeeper; it will turn away an extra voltage that might harm the circuit. Of course, it has its limits, so don’t hook up your Arduino to anything greater than 20 volts.
• Reset Button-Pushing it will temporarily connect the reset pin to ground and restart any code that is loaded on the Arduino.
• Power LED Indicator-This LED should light up whenever you plug your Arduino into a power source.

• TX & RX LED's-These lights blink when a Data-Tansfer take place between Arduino and your computer.

 NOTE:-
NEVER SUPPLY YOUR ARDUINO WITH MORE THAN 20 volt.