Appendix 1
Installing Arduino Libraries

One of the biggest advantages of the Arduino product line is that it is built on an open hardware platform. This means that anyone is able to contribute to the hardware and software libraries. These libraries can be easily incorporated into Arduino sketches to extend the Arduino’s functionality and, in many cases, make it easier to write the sketches yourself.

Several projects in this book benefitted from such community contributions. Unfortunately, installing new Arduino libraries isn’t as automatic as running a setup script. Library files, which are often distributed in a compressed .zip format, need to be uncompressed and placed into the Arduino’s libraries folder. The location of this folder varies depending on which operating system the Arduino IDE is running on.