Arduino started in 2005 as a project for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. At that time program students used a "BASIC Stamp" at a cost of $100, considered expensive for students. Massimo Banzi, one of the founders, taught at Ivrea.
A hardware thesis was contributed for a wiring design by Colombian student Hernando Barragan. After the wiring platform was complete, researchers worked to make it lighter, less expensive, and available to the open source community. The school eventually closed down, so these researchers, one of them David Cuartielles, promoted the idea.
The Arduino integrated development environment (IDE) is a cross-platform application written in Java, and is derived from the IDE for the Processing programming language and the Wiring projects. It is designed to introduce programming to artists and other newcomers unfamiliar with software development. It includes a code editor with features such as syntax highlighting, brace matching, and automatic indentation, and is also capable of compiling and uploading programs to the board with a single click. A program or code written for Arduino is called a "sketch".
Arduino programs are written in C or C++. The Arduino IDE comes with a software library called "Wiring" from the original Wiring project, which makes many common input/output operations much easier. Users only need define two functions to make a runnable cyclic executive program:
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