Generic boards

At the beginning of this book, we noted that the Arduino is an open source hardware and software platform. All the original hardware design files are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. This license allows both personal and commercial derivatives of all the Arduino boards if they credit Arduino and release their design under the same license. This has led to many lower price generic boards.

If you search for an Arduino board on most online retailer sites, the majority of the boards will not actually be genuine Arduino boards. If you look at the Arduino Uno board in the following photograph, you will notice an infinity sign with a plus (+) and minus (-) in it. That is the official Arduino logo and any board that has this logo is a genuine Arduino board.

In this book, we will be using mostly generic Arduino boards as they are cheaper and usually easier to obtain. The following photograph shows what some generic Arduino boards look like. The first photograph shows two generic Arduino Uno boards:

The next photograph shows a generic Arduino Mega 2560 board:

You will notice that these generic boards do not contain the Arduino logo; however, they still contain the name of the official board. While the previous generic boards look very similar to the official Arduino boards, that is not required. Some manufacturers chose to take the Arduino reference design and add additional functionality to their boards. The board in the following photograph is an example of this:

The DFRobot RoMeo BLE board is an Arduino-compatible robot control board with Bluetooth LE 4.0. This board takes the design of the Arduino Uno and adds a number of extra features, such as built-in Bluetooth and an integrated two-way DC motor driver.

No matter what your project is, you can probably find either a genuine Arduino board or a generic/compatible one that will fit your needs.