Week 7 - Embedded Programing

Notes about embedded programming from Brian's recitation:

Arduino is a board, form factor, libraries, IDE, bootloader, and headers. It makes own IDE and hardware boards.
AVR-C and Arduino-C are a set of specific extensions to C to allow us to program microcontrollers.
There exists a libary manager (we had a fab) and bootloader. However, using their libraries takes up a lot of memory and thus performance sacrifice.
Always tell the microcontroller on what pins you have connected to inputs/outputs. You need to use analog/digilal write/read to send/get values from them.
Use Serial to print to terminal.
C has 5 basic datatypes: int, float, char, char string, and composite types.
White space doesn't matter.
Semicolons, arrays, loops, and variable creation are the same as Java.
This languages uses i++ (this makes me so happy).
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Ideation

Since my final project involves having LEDs light up in a row, ideally for this week, I'd add a second LED to my board from Week 5 (which Anthony said was doable) and have the two LEDs light up one after another. I could also come up with some data by watching adsbexchange, have an LED correspond to one specific point on a runway, and have the LED light up whenever a plane passed by that point on the airport.

Programming

So first I wanted to just make my board do something non-zero, which is to just get the LED to light up. Since my LED was connected to pin five, my "#define LED 5" line at the start of my Arduino code was to indicate that my LED output was connected to pin 5, and I added a simple infinite loop for the LED to blink. Unfortunately, nothing happened with my board, even though my diode was soldered on in the right direction (I'd hope so, given how many times I checked during Week 5), so I was concerned if my board had gotten damaged during its time in my backpack. I poked at it with a multimeter, changed the length of the blink time, consulted Jake's microcontroller guide, and figured that I should use pin number 15 in my code instead of pin 5 (to match the SAMD11C's PA15 pin number). And that did the trick!

It lights up!

Now the next step was to figure out how to read in data (an Excel sheet maybe?) that corresponds to where on the runways/taxiways planes are, as well as draw up some "fake" data by watching the airplane trackers. Brief googling only indicated ways to export Arduino sensor data into Excel sheets, so it seems like one challenge for my final project would be how to communicate airplane location data to my board after uploading my code to my board, not to mention doing so in continuously in real-time. Before I could actually write up the code to get my LED to blink whenever a plane reached the start of the runway, I unfortunately was hit by burnout, so this will be a task I'll figure out this week, and my board at least does something.

Thanks to Harrison for helping me debug, Anthony for providing advice about my final project and for the USB extender, Brian for his recitation, and Jake for his primer.