You may find that your Arduino board's 'L' LED already blinks when you connect it to a USB plug. This is because Arduino boards are generally shipped with the 'Blink' sketch pre-installed.

In this lesson, we will reprogram the Arduino with our own Blink sketch and then change the rate at which it blinks.

In Lesson 0, you setup your Arduino IDE and made sure that you could find the right serial port for it to connect to your Arduino board. The time has now come to put that connection to the test and program your Arduino board.

The Arduino IDE includes a large collection of example sketches that you can load up and use. This includes an example sketch for making the 'L' LED blink.

Load the 'Blink' sketch that you will find in the IDE's menu system under File → Examples → 01.Basics
When the sketch window opens, enlarge it so that you can see the whole of the sketch in the window.

This guide was first published on Nov 28, 2012. It was last updated on Oct 04, 2012.

This page (Loading the 'Blink' Example) was last updated on Oct 04, 2012.

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