Due to stolen laptop no screenshots! :(

Embedded programming proved to be VERY difficult. I have never been interested in programming nor have I ever tried this out. I had always imagined it being like editing a spreadsheet with formulas. I was very wrong on that. The homework assignment of reading through the Tiny44 Datasheet was next to impossible. 70 pages in and I could not understand anything past the initial drawing on page 2. It could have well been sheet music (which I also can't read or understand). After another hour of tutoring I was about to give up.

Then I discovered Arduino software. This made things a bit more understandable. At least it gave me a visual refference on what I was supposed to do. It looked more like HTML-code with pretty colors and text explaining the commands and what they are supposed to do. Even with this setup it took me an hour or two to figure out how to use it. Eventually we (My brother and I worked together on this project due to stolen laptop) had one LED light up. But it lit up whenever it liked and it almost looked like it was touch sensitive. Our guru explained that it was from not defining where current needed to go. After routing the current through the VCC the LED started to work like it should. Some tinkering in the commands further and now we had the red LED blink and the green only on when the red was not on. Adding the button in the software was simpler. We cheated using the basic sheets provided by Arduino and adding our own code to the sofware. Hey, it worked!



After this we reprogrammed the chip to work with the Echo commands. Programming the chip worked well but the communication with Python did not. First the whole thing crashed and later the software could not identify the USB port. It was like the port was not being seen at all by the system. Although it does provide power and read/write. This is under MacOSX. More on this later.





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