Homework
- Our homework was to program the Hello Echo Board to do something. At a minimum, I should be able to push the button and light the LED light. If I'm lucky, I'll program it to "echo" my commands, which is totally fitting given the name of the board.
Challenges
- Where do I begin? I am a BEGINNER with electronics, so you can imagine what a daunting task this is. My local guru, Scott, explained the process very simply.........make clean, make hex, make fuse, make program. Even knowing that, it was very difficult.
- My button wasn't soldered down flat, so I had to push the side of the button down to get it to work. Ultimately, I had to unsolder it and resolder it to get the button to work easily.
- Reading a microcontroller data sheet is not hard, it's just time-consuming. The biggest thing I learned is what each pin is intended for and what the microprocessor can really do. It offers a lot of programming help. It's difficult to understand all of the language in the data sheet being a beginner. I still have questions......What do all the symbols mean, besides V which I quickly figured out is voltage because I'm so sharp! HaHa! Some of the "scientific notations" are Greek to me. The CPU core diagram was a good visual, but I didn't know a lot of the terminology on it.
- First I had to read the microcontroller data sheet which was long!
- Next, I had to find an example program to model after, so I looked at my teacher, Scott's page from last year and he guided me through programming again, since I am a beginner.
- I installed all the necessary programs I would need in order to actually program my board to do something......avrdude, gavarasm, gcc-avr.
myersg@SOI-MYERSG:~$ myersg@SOI-MYERSG:~$ sudo apt-get install gcc-avr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: binutils-avr Suggested packages: task-c-devel gcc-doc gcc-4.2 avr-libc The following NEW packages will be installed: binutils-avr gcc-avr 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 48 not upgraded. Need to get 12.6 MB of archives. After this operation, 67.3 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe binutils-avr amd64 2.23.1-2.1 [1,312 kB] Get:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe gcc-avr amd64 1:4.8-2.1 [11.3 MB] Fetched 12.6 MB in 8s (1,482 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package binutils-avr. (Reading database ... 164118 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../binutils-avr_2.23.1-2.1_amd64.deb ... Unpacking binutils-avr (2.23.1-2.1) ... Selecting previously unselected package gcc-avr. Preparing to unpack .../gcc-avr_1%3a4.8-2.1_amd64.deb ... Unpacking gcc-avr (1:4.8-2.1) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) ... Setting up binutils-avr (2.23.1-2.1) ... Setting up gcc-avr (1:4.8-2.1) ... myersg@SOI-MYERSG:~$ sudo apt-get install avr-libc Reading package lists... Done
Programming and Code
I programmed in Linux using Assembler first. Programming in C was more challenging.
blink code in C
make file for C
blink code in Assembler
make commands for Assembler
Programming The Board