Week 7: Embedded Programming

This week, I pushed a button repeatedly causing a light to turn on and off!

I spent a large amount of time this week simply figuring out what all the terms meant, how the parts of a microcontroller interact with one another, and generally dragging myself out of my confusion. Dixon sent around a helpful book, and reading through the first few chapters of that really clarified the terminology used in class and gave me a broad picture of how to move from software to hardware.

My other savior this week, in addition to that book, was this tutorial. Though I ended up focusing on a different, simpler light blinking program, this tutorial was very clear in breaking down the steps to programming a board with a simple c program.

Button-response light program without (above) and with (below) macros - taken from tutorial mentioned below

It was initially a bit hard for me to understand why one would want to use a program that looks more complicated with the inclusion of macros like shown below, but working through this tutorial helped me navigate how code corresponds to pins/ports/etc. Ultimately, this week was a modest but solid start to learning about embedded programming.