The Arduino is a real jack-of-all-trades. You can use this inexpensive microcontroller board for all kinds of things thanks to the expansion connectors for which countless 'shields' are available. In an article published in Elektor’s September & October 2015 edition we show you how you can realize a 'sound-level traffic light' using an Uno, together with an Elektor-developed multipurpose shield and a handful of common parts.

The book Mastering Microcontrollers — helped By Arduino is an excellent starting point for anyone who would like to get started using microcontrollers and their programming, without the requirement for a lot of prior knowledge. The book also describes several different hardware examples, which you can usually build on a small piece of experimenting board. In the second edition of the book an extra chapter was added, which contains even more examples. A universal shield was developed for these examples, which is available from the Elektor Store, either by itself or as part of a kit. This can be used to quickly build the various circuits.