Embedded Programming

This week we were tasked to program our board from the electronics production week.

When I went to program my board, I realized that I had forgotten to connect the RESET pin on the microcontroller to the RESET pin on the 6-pin header. I tried to fix this by connecting the two ports with a jumper wire, but I kept getting the dreaded “initialization failed” error.

My second board faired similarly, though this time I was getting a “MOSI and SCK not connected properly error”.

My third board worked great! :)

The three boards I made for this week. The top-left board was missing a trace, and the bottom board just failed.

Programming

Since I spent so much of this week debugging issues with my boards, I didn’t have a great deal of time to program the board. I used the Arduino IDE to compile to AVR ISP code. Here is my board with the stock Arduino “blink” script:

To test the button, I wrote a quick Arduino script which mirrors the LED to the button state:

int pushButton = 3;

void setup() {
  // initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
  pinMode(7, OUTPUT);
  // make the pushbutton's pin an input:
  pinMode(pushButton, INPUT);
}

void loop() {

  int buttonState = digitalRead(pushButton);
  if (buttonState == 0)
    digitalWrite(7, HIGH);
  else
    digitalWrite(7, LOW);
  delay(1);
}

Here is the board in action.

I am looking forward to building more sophisticated boards and programs in future weeks!