Getting Started
Standard beginning : any questions about anything so far?
Please do ask questions along the way!
nuts'n'bolts
Expectations :
'welcome to my classroom' - Rob Jenkins, chronicle of higher ed. (Basically, I expect you to act like responsible adults.)
How to submit your weekly (due Tuesdays) work : though this website. (I'll do a demo.)
Please browse the
resources page for all
sorts of helpful links and software tools.
Logan Davis (ldavis@marlboro.edu) is coteaching this course.
They will be be more likely to be around campus at hours than Jim will be ...
You can also email me (mahoney@marlboro.edu) with questions
or setup times to work individually as needed.
The term grade will be based on your
weekly assignments, which should demonstrate
your engagement with this material - for
the most part these will be discussions
of what you've done. There will be one more
substantial piece of work to turn in,
namely a "lab report" describing one
of the projects in more detail - what
you built, the circuit, the code,
and all that. We'll talk about all
this more as we we go along.
resources
Browse through the links on the
resources page
Setting up the Sparkfun Kit
SIK - Sparkfun Inventor's Kit
Your job today is to get the BLINK LAB up and running.
To get things working , follow page 4 in the RedBoard_SIK_3.2.pdf ... discuss & go over their instructions in class.
Getting it working the first time can be a PITA.
Be patient - your particular computer may be
finicky.
The Sparkfun RedBoard (an Arduino Uno variation) used an FTDI USB to Serial chip to talk to your laptop. This means that you may need the FTDI drivers installed to get things to work,
which you can find on this page :
circuits
Talk about voltage and current
and how to hook up a multimeters to measure
the voltage and current of the Blink circuit.
Describe the breadboard : what is connected to what,
and how to use it.
Discuss the circuit for the "Blink" lab.
Does the current flow in a loop? (That's
what most discussions of circuits say.
But the schematic on pg 19 of the RedBoard_SIK
doesn't look like a loop. What's going on?)
Talk about for circuit elements.
Define "resistance".
More circuit elements (capacitors etc)
and concepts (series/parallel etc) coming later.
code
Talk about the Arduino programming language, which
is based on the Processing language
Programming concepts
- comments (i.e. lines that are just remarks for humans)
- variables (i.e. "a = 3")
- functions (a mini-program)
- loops (do something many times, i.e. "for ...")
More programming ideas coming later ...
- conditionals (do something if conditions are right, i.e. "if ..." )
- lists (collection of data)
- ...
Arduino programs :
- Your code is managed by a supervisor program.
- The supervisor calls (i.e. runs) two of your functions :
- setup() function : required ; runs once
- loop() function : required ; runs over and over
when it doesn't work
After reading the instructions and checking
your work,
Discussing debugging what's what :
- testing the wires and connections - is there extra resistance somewhere?
- testing the code -
ASSUME NOTHING! CHECK EVERYTHING!
- Make the code and/or circuit simpler until it works or it is obvious what is broken.
what's next
Variations on the Blink lab :
- More than one LED?
- Change the timing of the blink?
- Blink in patterns?
I'll decide what we'll be doing
next week and post an assignment
once I see where you folks are.
