Maker SHED

This kit has everything you need to get started with Arduino, the open-source electronics prototyping platform that's taken the design and hobbyist world by storm. Using the included components, along with our best-selling Getting Started with Arduino, 2nd Edition (sold separately), you'll be able to start building electronics projects that can sense and react to the physical world. Within seconds of opening the box, you can connect Arduino to your computer using a USB cable (both the cable and Arduino are included) and start playing. With the free software available from the Arduino web site, you can start writing simple programs (called "sketches" in Arduino) and move on up to more complex examples. 

With this kit, you can: 

• Learn how to wire up and blink the most basic of actuators: an LED 
• Connect the most basic of sensors (a switch) and monitor it for changes in values 
• Write sketches to do interesting things in response to real-world changes 
• Work with other sensors, such as photoresistor, which changes value depending on how much light there is

With Arduino, you'll be able to make the physical world as programmable as the digital world. This kit includes the basic parts you need to start learning Arduino. Even after you graduate to more complicated projects and a wider variety of sensors, you'll still find that the components in this kit form an important part of your prototyping toolkit. 

• • Arduino 101 videos from the Maker Shed
  • Official Arduino site
  • MAKE Blog Arduino archives
  • MAKE video: Intro to the Arduino
  • MAKE Forums
  • Arduino Knowledge Index
  • Buy more Arduino accessories

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board.

Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can communicate with software running on your computer, such as Flash, Processing, and MaxMSP. The boards can be purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, a similar physical computing platform, which is based on the Processing multimedia programming environment. Arduino is open source!