Installing the Arduino Environment

First, you need to direct yourself to the Arduino site. Open your web browser and enter this URL: www.arduino.cc/

Click “Search”, or press the Enter button on your keyboard.

The Arduino home page should have appeared. Click the download button, shown in a red box in the picture.

You will be taken to the download page. Under “Download” (shown inside a red box in the image), there is a list of options for what systems you can install the software on. Since I have a Mac OS X, I chose the Mac OS X option.

Once you click on the correct option, the download should automatically start. It usually takes a little more than a minute to load.

Once it finishes loading, you need to decompress the .zip file. On Macs, it does this automatically, but on other systems the method varies.

For Windows, right-click the file and then click “Extract” on the shortcut menu.

Linux is much more complicated. Once you download the file you must click Application > System Tools > Terminal, which will open the terminal window. Once in Terminal, enter this text if you are a root user (you will see the “#” prompt): apt-get install unzip. If you are a Red Hat Linux/Fedora user, enter this in Terminal: yum install unzip.

Once the software is unzipped, open the folder and double-click on the Arduino icon. It should open the Arduino environment!

One last comment: To start programming, you need to select the board you are using by clicking Tools > Board, and then choose the serial port by clicking Tools > Serial Port.

And that’s it! You’ve downloaded the Arduino environment! Have fun!