Hi,

I will be using an Arduino Nano for the first time. If I buy the one in the link below (which does not look original), will it give me trouble? Also, apart from the board and the cable which are included in this, will I require other things such as software or something?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Arduino-N...al_Components_Supplies_ET&hash=item1e736cbb00

Thanks.

 

It's an Arduino clone and seeing as the price is substantially less than that on Digikey ($43) its a good enough deal.
The cloned boards may range from being pretty messed up to very good and it depends on which variety you buy. That being said, most of them are good enough in my experience.

Some of them may vary in implementation details. For example, they may substitute the standard FTDI chip with a cheaper USB-UART bridge - depending on how the USB is implemented you might require drivers for it. Some have male instead of female connectors as in the Uno clones.

The one you listed however, doesn't seem to differ much.

Yes, you would require the Arduino IDE to get started on programming the board. You can download it from here.

You could use the Arduino language which is just a C language wrapper which looks syntactically similar to C/C++ or you could program it in pure C using avr-gcc (which incidentally has a good Eclipse integration plugin). Either way, setting it up is pretty easy.

Hope this helps.

 

Thanks for the reply. Since the IDE download link is from the ARDUINO site, will I work with a clone arduino?

 

In general, yes it would work. You'd need to consult the board schematic or manual to see if there are any minor changes. The one I used had specs conforming to the Uno so I didn't have to make any changes apart from selecting the correct board in the IDE.

If it does differ slightly (different baud rate or bootloader) you need to modify the boards.txt file for the IDE. You can probably get this data from the manual you usually get with the cloned boards.

This seems to the website for the eBay listing you mentioned. It appears to be very similar to the original board so you might not need any adjustments after all.

 

Arduino, the organization, provides detailed information about their hardware. This means that anyone can build their own arduino board. There are more than few examples of people taking Arduino hardware information, buying the parts, and building their own "arduino" board with the exact features they want, not implementing features they don't need.

If the builder of the board followed Arduino hardware, the Arduino software will work just fine.

 

I have used a couple of Nano clones like that one (I can't say it is exactly the same one) and they work fine with the Arduino software. As shteli01 says Arduino is an open hardware platform, the Nano schematic is on this page: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardNano. There is actually very little on the board -an Atmega328, USB-Serial chip some LEDs and a few support components.