Transistors are semiconductor devices that form the basis of today's electronic technology. Following the first step of developing a point-contact transistor developed by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen in 1947, the development of the junction transistor by William Shockley in early 1948 opened the way for rapid progress in electronic technology. The processors of today's computers or mobile phones can contain millions of transistors. For this reason, the way to understand how today's technology works is to first understand the transistors that form the basis of these technologies. In this paper we describe an alternative way of determining transistor characteristics by using the Arduino.