Also known as: Arduino
Arduino is a widely used family of beginner-friendly microcontroller boards and the open-source ecosystem of tools and code built around them.1
Overview
An Arduino program is called a sketch. The simple Arduino IDE, plus a huge library and “shield” ecosystem of plug-in add-on boards, is what made microcontrollers approachable to hobbyists and students. Classic Arduino boards are 8-bit and modest in speed and memory, but that is enough for sensors, motors, and small projects.
Where it fits
Arduino sits at the gentle end of embedded computing: you wire components to its GPIO pins, write a sketch, and flash it onto the board. The ecosystem’s tooling has spread well beyond the original boards — many other microcontrollers, including the ESP32, can be programmed with the Arduino IDE too. These tiny boards drive the kinds of small radios that fill the airwaves GopherTrunk listens to.