Hardware Programming - Practical Learning

Question

Besides Arduino , what other ways to learn hardware programming in practical terms? Are there any great kits, or a ready-made robot that you can program to move in a certain way, or do certain things, or something like that?

Answer 1

Atmel AVR and PIC both have experimental boards on which you can use soldering material, usually they have a few buttons and some lights pre-soldered to the area. This allows you to program / flash the microprocessor and play with the output pins. You can either write programs in assembly or in C.

Parallax has several sets. They have two product lines suitable for the “game”, “Main Stamp” and something called the Propeller . The first is a small microprocessor that runs programs written in Basic (a little disgusting;)), and the latter runs something called Spin or assembly (well, obviously, after compilation).

I would go with AVR or PIC. I did a PIC, but I heard good things about AVR, they seem to deliver the best software.

Answer 2

First look that Microsoft VPL sounds good, but when it comes to SCIENTIFICATION, how the hardware works, it makes a LONG way to hide this data from you. In fact, it is largely intended for people who don’t program, and disgusting for those who actually wrote firmware. IF you just want something to happen and not go into details, this is fine, but if you want to switch to metal, like programming Arduino boards, this is not for you.

If you are used to something like Arduino, something like PIC will be a lightweight transistor. SparcFun Electronics has all kinds of DIY projects and equipment. If you have a decent bookstore around your area, I would suggest looking for Circuit Cellar magazine. It has articles on a monthly basis with a project for those who want to get into hardware projects, everything from the software Defined Radio home program to FPGA-based 3D graphics. (Raytracing in fact) Typically, authors describe a project in an article and “WHY” they took their decisions, description and hardware diagram and provided a link to the source code.

Cypress Semiconductor has one of the most interesting embedded processors on the market and several high-quality boards for sale. PSoC includes the ability not only to configure the software, but also to "cast" the software configured by such an apparatus as analog-to-digital converters, serial input-output, digital-to-analog and various amplifiers and filters. It's a REALLY cool concept, and the PSoC touch sensor capability has actually been used on several iPod models.

One thing about programming these small micros: they don’t have much between you and the hardware, you see how everything works. It doesn't matter if you're talking about an 8-bit microcontroller or a quad-core Pentium software, the concept is pretty much the same. You write to a memory-bound register for some hardware, such as a serial controller, and the hardware responds in some way. If you program the speed generator in a PIC or PC, this is pretty much the same idea, you write a value that will be used as a division factor from a given clock to achieve a given transmission speed. Numbers and names may be different, but the concepts are the same. On a PC, you may have to map the PCI address of the card, which will add some complexity, but if you look under the OS, you will see that this was only done by writing values ​​to the simalar registers for PIC programming to use a different "page" of memory. Is it worth it to study the 8-goth? Well, now about $ 5 billion is sold by small 8-bit microphones with a forecast showing only growth in this market in the future. I saw one link that said that the average car has 25 microcontrollers. It's not so bad.

Answer 3

I have not played with this a lot, but iRobot looks pretty cool.

The ability to simulate how your robot will work, that some of the other answers mentioned are good, but there is nothing like how a real robot will do what you programmed it. For me, this is what really makes robots fun and cool.

Answer 4

Here is the .NET Micro Framework.

It is incredibly easy to use / configure and there is a lot of hardware designed for this platform.

Answer 5

You should take a look at Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio , which supports many different sets.

Answer 6

I was always interested in learning gumstix . It seems more professional than arduino, and it targets a Linux programmer. I can’t give you real suggestions since I have never played with him, but I will definitely go with one of these toys if I had to do this and learn some cool hardware programming.