So I was starting off the Arduino and I did not know a thing about it! All I knew is that you could be Iron Man from this tiny thing. My skill was coding and none of the hardware stuff so I knew I had to learn. This post serves to document my journey into this Arduino world. What I know so far... Arduino is open source, the hardware AND software(Cool huh?) Arduino needs an IDE You can connect it to your pi STEP ONE: Download the IDE from this link. Depending on the OS. I'm on Ubuntu 16.04. I downloaded- did the ./install.sh and voila! done. What the challenge now was to navigate the board properly but after a bit of reading I learnt that pin 13 has an inbuilt resistor and putting in the LED was now easy as cathode gets into the GND and our friendly pin 13 has our back! Now my challenge became the permission error then I realised how to set permissions with this Linux code sudo chmod a+rw /dev/ttyACM0 And you ready to go! Seconds later- I had my blinking