AGE OF THE ARDUINO

Abstract

Available for as little as £4 (US$5) for the basic circuit board, or about £50 for a kit including power supply, case and cables, these systems have little in the way of bells and whistles, and the learning curve can be steep. There's even an all-in-one system developed for an outreach project on the International Space Station; the system combines a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a magnetometer and sensors to measure temperature, barometric pressure and humidity. Here on Earth, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and similar devices have been used to build underwater sound recorders for marine research, robots for assembling gene-editing tools and systems that can rapidly identify drug-resistant pathogens from human samples.