This week our individual assignment was: read a microcontroller data sheet, and program your board to do something, with as many different programming languages and programming environments as possible.

I sucessfully ran four programs: Blink.ino, Button.ino, Button.c, and a modified version of Mario.ino I uploaded my programs via the Arduino IDE. At first I attempted to upload from my brand new Dell in a windows environment; however, I kept getting an error about my board not being found. I tried using some boards in shop that were known to be working, but they did not program successfully either. This made me think it must be a problem with my Windows environment as opposed to my board. So I tried again using one of the computers in the shop, this time in a Linux environment, and the program uploaded successfully on the very first try. If you find yourself in a similar scenario, it could be a poorly soldered connection, but try a different machine first.

After running the out of the box arduino examples for Blink and Button, I decided to try re-writing Button in C using Niel's echo.c program as a template and a helpful walkthrough from 2017's Lilly Gabaree. Additionally, this semester I have been learning C in CS50, so I could orient myself a bit. The resulting C file was a lot more verbose than the Arduino one, but that's simply because Arduino has more going on behind the scenes. The C program compiled and uploaded much faster than the Arduino one.

Over the summer, I purchased an arduino UNO and was able to play the Mario theme using a Piezo buzzer. I wanted to see if I could do the same using my Tiny44, so I jerry rigged a Piezo buzzer to my board via some wires, connecting a 1K ohm resistor to the ground wire. After editing the Mario file to reflect my board's ports, I went to verify my code before upload (the check button in Arduino IDE). Much to my surprise, the simple theme song program required over 300% of the memory available on the humble Tiny44, which has only 256 bytes. I removed a substantial amount of the program, including the Underworld Theme and all of the unused notes. When this was still not enough, I had to resort to trimming the Mario theme itself. I was left with about one third of the original theme, using less than one third of the original memory required. After all the trouble, it actually worked. I couldn't believe it!

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