The purpose of this prelab is to get your PC set up for working with the Arduino and more importantly the AT Mega328 used on the Arduino. The Arduino is an Open Source educational development system intended to be used to teach art and humanities students how to create artful and useful systems without having to understand the details of the hardware. The Arduino software development IDE implements a varient of the C++ language (and thus C) with a rich set of libraries that hide all (or most of) of the details of the hardware. In this course we will be using the Arduino as a breakout board for the ATmega328, mostly because because the board has a built-in USB interface for downloading your programs into the ATmega328 (this eliminates setting up messy and hard to find serial ports on PCs).