Arduino Course for Absolute Beginners

Arduino IDE and Sketch Overview

In order to program the Arduino, you will need to get familiar with the Arduino IDE.

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Let’s take a look at some of the buttons on the  Arduino IDE.

The button that looks like a checkmark is called “verify”. When you press this, your code will be compiled and any errors will be displayed in the window at the bottom. The shortcut key for verify is Control + R.

The button in the shape of an arrow pointing right is the upload button. When you press this, the sketch will be uploaded to your Arduino board. The shortcut key for upload is Control + U.

The button on the far right side of the screen is the serial monitor button. When you use the serial monitor functions, you can send and receive information from your Arduino board while it is running. We will talk much more about serial monitor later, but I just wanted to point it out now. The shortcut key for serial monitor is Shift + Control + M.

Try On Your Own

This course is based around the example sketches provided with the Arduino IDE. Open up your Arduino IDE and go to File > Example > 01.Basics and open up three different sketches. Try loading the sketches to your Arduino using the mouse and the keyboard shortcuts.

Further Reading

Check out this Arduino.cc webpage and see if you can identify a couple things you learned and pick up on other things I did not cover.