Let the fun begin!

You brought your Arduino but not sure what to do now? In this tutorial I'm going to take you step by step through the process of writing your first Arduino Sketch and loading it onto your Arduino. 

Software

1. Ensure you install the Arduino IDE
2. Install the USB drivers (if you have installed these drivers you can skip the following steps)
3. Download the driver
4. Unzip the driver folder.
5. Run the installation for the driver.
6. It's recommended that you restart your computer at this stage.

Hardware

In this example we will make use of the Arduino R3 but the principals remains the same.

1. Connect the Arduino to your PC via USB cable.
2. Let's ensure that our driver detected the Arduino, open device manager on your computer (press the Windows button and type "device manager"
   
   
3. Navigate to the "Ports" section and expand;
   
   
4. Take note on what of the COM port number for your device, in my case it's COM21.

Programming

1. Open the Arduino IDE.
2. Navigate to "Tools" and then "Port" and select the appropriate port;
3. Next navigate to "Tools" and select "Get Board Info" you should see something similar to the following;
4. Now we are ready to write a basic program to test our board, change the code to the following;
5. Press the Upload button arrow (In above image the mouse pointer is on the button)
6. You should see your LED flashing hyper actively.
7. If this is not the case consider a reboot of the PC, I have seen in the past that when you run Arduino runs for the first time you sometimes have problems connecting to your board.