Microcontrollers

Design:

I started this assignment by modifying the hello.echo board to include a button in cad.py. This was easier than I expected and gave me hope for the rest of the assingment.


Milling:

The modela was generally in a bad mood this week so milling the board took longer than I had hoped, but stuffing it went well.


Although this was some of the best soldering I'd done to date (with the exception of the resistors) I still had to go back and reflow parts of it when I went to program it.

Programming:

Having never successfully programmed the hello.world board, I decided to remake my cables, just incase that was the problem. After doing that I plugged it into the computer in the lab and got the familiar: Device not detected. Error. Bummer. I checked connections and reflowed a couple of leads and magically I was able to program the processor. (Wish I had a screenshot of that).

Running the hello.echo.asm program did not go so well. My serial cable, despite being the second one I'd made, still didn't work and I still had to reflow more leads. For a while I was able to write to the chip (the LED went off) but could not read from it (no response to typing). But after some time I finally got it to work.

I then forged into the land of Assembly Code. Since the only training we were given in assembly was basically “read the manual” I found learning code this way to be like opening a French dictionary and expecting to learn French. Definitely not the most efficient way to go about it.

This is as far as I've gotten so far. I'm working on learning how to modify the assembly code....