Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project and user community that designs and manufactures  single-board microcontrollers and  microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its products are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License  (GPL), permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially in preassembled form or as do-it-yourself (DIY) kits.

Arduino board designs use a variety of microprocessors and controllers. The boards are equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards ('shields') or breadboards (For prototyping) and other circuits.

The boards feature serial communications interfaces, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) on some models, which are also used for loading programs from personal computers. The microcontrollers can be programmed using C and C++ programming languages. In addition to using traditional  compiler toolchains, the Arduino project provides an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing language project.