Imagine you’re baking a cake. You follow a recipe that tells you what to do and when to do it — like mixing the batter, heating the oven, setting the timer, and decorating the top. Now imagine if a tiny robot in your kitchen could read that recipe and do all the steps for you without making a mess. Pretty cool, right? That tiny robot? That’s kind of what a microcontroller is. A microcontroller is a small computer built into devices to control how they work.