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Microcontroller programming (Arduino, Microchip PIC, etc)
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22-03-2011 11:11pm#1
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conor.hogan.2 wrote: »Its lack of money and time and not being bothered atm.
Have you used them? If so where do you get your parts? I know maker sell kits.
Ebay mostly. Got 5 PICs for about 5GBP (12f`s tiny 8-pin yokes), the programmer was a wee bit more expensive but there is DIY jobs. One can make a very cheap arduino board this way too http://www.instructables.com/id/Perfboard-Hackduino-Arduino-compatible-circuit/ although I havn't tried. I must also admit I found a PIC or two "just laying around" at college. Of course I will return these when I finish
not that they will miss them or anything 0 -
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Anyone here into this kind of stuff. Been reading around the forum and only been finding posts about very high level (mostly web related) programming. Nothing wrong with that but I'm just looking to see if anyone else on here is into Arduinos and what have you.
Yeah, messed around with arduinos a little bit.
Really easy to work with, nice docs, easy to get up and running, thoroughly recommend them if you want to play with microcontrollers.
Here is a video of simple project I did, with an old RC car I bought for a fiver on adverts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoCA7rZMdpQ
I ripped out all the electronic guts of it, and replaced it with an arduino, and a motor controller and all that stuff.
It even has a laser
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Ahhhh! That's exactly the stuff I want to go doing. Something that has results! I might give a start at this stuff too! So excitingYeah, messed around with arduinos a little bit.
Really easy to work with, nice docs, easy to get up and running, thoroughly recommend them if you want to play with microcontrollers.
Here is a video of simple project I did, with an old RC car I bought for a fiver on adverts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoCA7rZMdpQ
I ripped out all the electronic guts of it, and replaced it with an arduino, and a motor controller and all that stuff.
It even has a laser0 -
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As I said before I haven't got around to using an arduino yet but am somewhat familiar with them. I'm just basing it on the fact that projects I've seen using arduino's have a much faster/easier coding stage than projects using PIC's. This is due to the much longer ramp up time in getting familiar with PIC's as well as PIC users having to code at a much lower level. Even using c is a fair bit closer to the bit level than what I've seen of arduino code.
Of course arduino's aren't actually cheating. I suppose it's just my dislike of moving up into the more abstract levels of coding. I'm an engineer as opposed to a coder at heart. I do think the arduino is a great tool but maybe it moves the user away from having to understand the hardware they are using. Maybe an inevitable move though since PC based coding has already done it.
Oblig:
First off, you could make the same argument about microcontrollers in general, and not just arduinos.
Working with a microcontroller CPU, and programming it, is much more abstract than going and implementing each piece of logic using ICs (or even analog circuits).
Anyway, more holistically, I think Arduino is having the opposite effect to the one you are concerned with.
Rather than moving developers away from the hardware, so that they learn less about whats going on - Arduino is actually bringing them back to it.
The fact that you can acomplish fairly impressive hardware interfacing, quickly and easily, with an arduino, encourages people to go and play with hardware.
People who would otherwise have avoided it, now go and get their hands dirty.
Just look at the huge number of arduino projects out there to see the effect this is having.
In turn, the number of other people doing cool projects, increases the amount of resources out there, the easy access to information, tutorials, etc.
And the end result is people learning lots of low level concepts, that they'd otherwise probably never deal with.
You still do acquire and use a lot of low level knowledge - Arduino makes the start of the learning curve much more accessible, but as you want to do progressively more things, you have to cover the harder stuff too.
Its easier to get started with an arduino, and use it to drive the guts of your project, but controlling the hardware is still a long way from VB6.The arduino has some great extensibility though like USB, LCD and ethernet shields.0 -
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See, if by "electronics" you mean LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and so on, cool.Deleted User wrote: »As a software head, I'd never have gone near electronics if it weren't for the arduino making it so accessible.
If by "electronics" you really mean "microcontrollers and assembly", then dude. Go play with the electronics now. It'll make you a better coder.
Why we gave up on the idea of handing out a bunch of wire and a handful of chips and saying "go build a PC" on the first day of first year in a CS course, I'll never know. I mean, after you do assembly, pointers, arrays, linked lists, callbacks, pretty much every code-level concept that takes a while to first introduce to someone, they're all far far simpler in your mental model.
Well, until you get to C++ and pointers to references anyway 0 -
See, if by "electronics" you mean LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and so on, cool.
If by "electronics" you really mean "microcontrollers and assembly", then dude. Go play with the electronics now. It'll make you a better coder.
Why we gave up on the idea of handing out a bunch of wire and a handful of chips and saying "go build a PC" on the first day of first year in a CS course, I'll never know. I mean, after you do assembly, pointers, arrays, linked lists, callbacks, pretty much every code-level concept that takes a while to first introduce to someone, they're all far far simpler in your mental model.
Well, until you get to C++ and pointers to references anyway
Current project has an arduino, LCD screen, 10k pot, some push buttons, some resistors. There will be more discrete components for the battery backup circuitry - unless I can buy that functionality prepackaged in a chip :-)
There's a lot to be said for knowing things from the ground up. Electricity, silicon properties, transistors, registers, Von Neumann architecture, etc. I'd have done a certain amount of that at college, and read up on it further later.
That being said with the number of layers of abstraction between the code and the hardware on a modern PC these days, there's no point in being a luddite for the sake of it. i.e. use assembly code where necessary for speed critical functions, use higher level code elsewhere and don't lose sleep if you use an IDE, third party frameworks and libraries :pac:0 -
I don't lose sleep over people who do that, knowing the tradeoffs and costs involved. I do get rather annoyed at people who do that because they know no other way to approach the problem. People like that make work for everyone else around them
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See, if by "electronics" you mean LEDs, resistors, capacitors, and so on, cool.
If by "electronics" you really mean "microcontrollers and assembly", then dude. Go play with the electronics now. It'll make you a better coder.
Why we gave up on the idea of handing out a bunch of wire and a handful of chips and saying "go build a PC" on the first day of first year in a CS course, I'll never know. I mean, after you do assembly, pointers, arrays, linked lists, callbacks, pretty much every code-level concept that takes a while to first introduce to someone, they're all far far simpler in your mental model.
Well, until you get to C++ and pointers to references anyway
I've a lot of sympathy for this point of view, but recently I've been wondering.
By about the end of second year, in CS in TCD, we'd built most of the parts of a computer, working from the level of the transistor upwards.
Not all at once, but we'd covered each core conceptual piece - built gates using wires, adders from transistor ICs, ALUs in circuit maker, pipelines etc.
Its really nice to have a good conceptual model of the main parts in an electronic computer, when it comes to programming an electronic computer. More importantly, while I am not familiar with what exactly is happening in a modern chip, I have the confidence that I could learn it, if I need to; and I have some sort of an informed intuition to guide me, whenever I have to work at a low level.
But at the same time, I feel we did too much hardware in our course. I stopped paying detailed attention to it around 3rd year, as I felt it got needlessly detailed.
I thought spending time reading about things like software engineering and architecture, which I felt were neglected in our course, made more sense. In retrospect, I think that outlook was correct.
Recently, I've been thinking if students should be thought even less hardware than we were.
(As an aside - I absolutely don't mean dumbing down. On the contrary, the standard must rise here. It really pisses me off in the 'dumbing down' debates that people don't see this. The standard in technical disciplines is rising globally - if the goal is to maintain standards, then we've already failed.)
A digital electronic computer is only one physical manifestation of the abstract idea of a computer. Why do we put so much focus on it?
I mean, in these days, when a dev is writing Java, to be executed, massively in parallel, on Google's App Engine, what's really going on?
They are writing code for a virtual machine, that has little relation to the underlying hardware. This code is then massively distributed across a host of machines, on each of which the JVM executes. These machines, may, in turn, possibly be virtual, running on geographically distributed physical server farms.
What the underlying physical architecture is, at that point, is really starting to become irrelevant.
A good understanding of idiosyncrasies of the JVM is probably more useful.
So, that's one thing that makes me think.
We've also an increasing use of (inherently quite abstract) functional languages. Languages like Clojure and Scala are gaining traction. Haskell, even, is growing.
The intersection between computer programming, and mathematics, seems to be increasing, as we use functional languages, and execute more in virtual environments.
A lot of the cool kids these days are writing code, using very abstract functional paradigms, executing on heterogeneous and physically distributed platforms.
I wonder if perhaps the way to approach modern computer science education should involve much less of the electronic engineer, and hardware; and instead come from the direction of the mathematician, or statistician - from formal logic, algebra; and mathematical tools such as the lambda calculus etc.
Also, there's an ever increasing role played by the tools of statistics; fundamentally, computers deal with information and data, and statistics must play a role, especially as developers want to achieve goals (be they business, or scientific) that deal with the more fuzzy, more noisy real-world data.
I dunno - there's a lot of stuff to learn, to be good at CS these days.
The world is changing - we need to solve fuzzier problems, and acomplish more, using higher level tools. We need to solve harder problems, and need more powerful paradigms.
Is it still possible, in a 4 year course, to equip someone with sufficient theory to use the more powerful tools available to us, and also teach them a thorough understanding of the underlying hardware?
I wonder if perhaps a much more mathematical and statistical approach is needed.
The hardware has been becoming less and less important, for a long time.
All that said, today, when I have to work with a graph thats 10s of GB in size, every byte of representation counts.0 -
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