Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino boards are able to read inputs – light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message – and turn it into an output – activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. You can tell your board what to do by sending a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board.

Yes, although it may require some modifications to the Arduino core libraries.

The expectation is that non-network-connected units will have their clocks updated manually at startup. Adding an RTC is surprisingly expensive once you have factored in batteries, area, and components, and would have pushed us above our target price. You can add one yourself using the GPIO pins if you’d like an interesting electronics project.

A microcontroller is a very small computer that has digital electronic devices (peripherals) built into it that helps it control things. These peripherals allow it to sense the world around it and drive the actions of external devices. An example of a use for a microcontroller is to sense a temperature and depending on the value sensed it could either turn on a fan if things were too warm or turn on a heater if things were too cool.

Arduino is now FCC certified! That means that the board by itself passes FCC certification for electromagnetic emissions. It does not mean that your project is FCC certified. The moment you change the Arduino, it’s no longer FCC certified (although we’d like some back-up documentation on this).