There are a number of projects that allow one to control an Arduino using node.js. For example, there's Noduino and Johnny-Five . To my mind these things are an abomination(*) because they are teaching people to use Arduino at the wrong level of abstraction. If you are going to learn Arduino, learn some C. One can always argue that they get more people using Arduino, but all these people would be better off learning some C for the joy of Arduino is not (to my mind) controlling it using a massive desktop or laptop machine. The joy of Arduino is small, embedded projects that do stuff. Such as Simonoids : And if they learn some C they'll get more out of Arduino because they'll be able to do things that the node.js layers don't allow: cool stuff. And once they've learnt some C and need to control the Arduino from the host they'll be able to do even more cool stuff. If you are going to learn Arduino, learn some C. To get an idea of what's problematic ab