Week 6 Reflection

This was the hardest week to date. I went through multiple iterations of milling and board creation for the SAMD11C. Additionally, I spent around 10 hours attempting to find a way to program the SAMD11C chip through the RP2040 instead of directly via USB port, a task that I later realized was impossible. After solving that miscommunication in expectations between myself and my instructor, I was able to get the hardware ready and the software was smooth sailing. Flashing the bootloader firmware onto the chip was pretty simple, but it was also an interesting experience in that I had never done something of that nature before. Writing a code to blink the LED was also pretty easy. I enjoyed bare metal programming as it impelled me to research more low-level programming in C and C++, a topic I've always been interested in but never really looked into. I really enjoyed exploring the different nuances in optimizing code and saving memory. Learning about the different usages and capabilities of the SAMD11C chip versus the ATTINY412 chip was also pretty enlightening.