Why Exit Arduino?

“Exiting Arduino” exists to give curious people a jumping off point into what the hardware is doing, how they can program a microcontroller, and what that programming actually means.

Arduino designed their ecosystem for people who don’t have any background in programming, and I think they’ve done an ecellent job. Take the verify button. It actually compiles the software. Why not call it “compile”?

I think calling the compile button “verify” good, intentional design which understands it’s target audience. Using familiar terminology is part of making hardware accessible to everyone. At what age do you understand what the word “verify” means? How about “compile”? And how much older to know that “compile” has a specific meaning in programming a computer, let alone what compiling a program actually does? Do you know the difference between a compiled language and an interpretted one?

The foks at Arduino continue to do an amazing job making hardware accessible. I love Arduino, and still use it for projects. You don’t need to read Instruction Sets or data sheets or fool around with tool chains. But what if you want to?

“Exiting Arduino” provides a bridge from the Arduino IDE and ecosystem into the general space of programming firmware. It’s a two-way bridge, really, as accessing both side of the river gives you more options. I think the more you know about what’s going on, the more you can do with the tools which automate it for you.

So, let’s strip away the parts that are Arduino, and the parts which are more general to programming hardware. You’ll quickly see how much effort went into Arduino, and why it’s so nice, especially since it’s Free.

This guide can take you away from Arduino if you want, but it also explains what Arduino is doing under the hood so to speak, so it’s also a way to get familiar with Arduino at a deeper level.

No tool is the perfect tool for every job, but a tool that is great for many jobs is a great tool, and Arduino is exactly that.

Anyways, thanks for checking this out, if you’ve no place else to start, try Starting from the Arduino IDE.

If you have suggestions or questions, head over to the github repo and raise an Issue.