Embedded Programming

This week's assignment was to program my board to do something. I think just looking at the list I found this one to be outright the most intimidating weekly project aside from the final project, solely because this one moved completely away from my comfort zone with mechanical work and machining, and more into building things by programming, which I've not had a particularly good track record. I was happy to discover that working with Arduinos a little bit over the course of the last couple of years helped prepare me to understand this project a little bit more, and ultimately I did manage to make the board accomplish something--it blinks an LED light. Having that baseline I would really like to get headers to plug into the 2x3 pins because I had to make some really lousy ones in the lab, and actually explore things like the analog inputs so that I can get something a little more interesting going on via a breadboard and some sort of sensor like a pressure sensor.

Well I'm sure the strange looking part of this here is the board hooked onto the end of the FTDI cable. I'm not going to go into detail, but I had some problems with my custom board. That being said, it's got virtually all the same components as the FABISP board. So I figured why let this restriction stop me, I'm just going to program something to do the thing. I went down to MITERS and grabbed this nice set up....which also helped keep me from having to locate the cables everyone was 'borrowing' in the west section. It's already got a board attached to it ready to program another board, so all I had to worry about was generating some simple code in Notepad ++, and then compiling everything onto the FABISP board.

Here's a low res image of my command line...Yay it compiled and everything! I used a tutorial that I found on "http://www.micahcarrick.com/tutorials/avr-microcontroller-tutorial/" to do everything. All I had to do was figure out how to change up my code because I was using a different microcontroller, and to ensure I had my pins lined up accurately. I also of course had to read the spreadsheet, and the most useful information on there was which ports are used for what and then picking what pins to use.

Light off....moment of truth.

Light on....so at the end of the day, I win! A little bit of a unique set up sure, especially if you look at those bootleg female header pins I threw on there, but I have a board that does the thing, so I can now move on to bigger, better, and more complex things in the future.

4.140/MAS.863

Where Emilee Johnson Tries to Make Almost Anything

Embedded Programming

Light off....moment of truth.

Light on....so at the end of the day, I win! A little bit of a unique set up sure, especially if you look at those bootleg female header pins I threw on there, but I have a board that does the thing, so I can now move on to bigger, better, and more complex things in the future.