I never had the inclination to try the Arduino, but the talk did lead to another board,
But for Phil I would look into the TMS430, or AVR, or even the PIC! BTW, I've found the Free Microchip C compiler to be relatively bug free. (a + for the newbee)
Cheers
These kind of boards are great for developing embedded Linux applications. And ofcourse these are a great start for your own custom design :-) In the past few months I've designed several embedded boards.
I'd stay away from PIC. Its architecture is way outdated. And the C compiler is pretty buggy if you push it. The Arduino eco system seems like a much better choice for a beginner. And ofcourse AVR and MSP430 are nice controllers to make the next step on the route to ARM.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
This is nonsense. The kid should be focusing on his school work and participating in college. Firmware is a time eater. Especially when you're learning. College is hard enough. This is the time when the kid should be getting those three years of college math. He should be experimenting with different subjects and finding out what interests him, not experimenting with what interests you. You want to intern him over the summer break in the family business, that's fine. During the school year, leave the kid to his studies.
Curious that you have such strong opinions about a family full of people you've never met.
Ah, I see, perhaps you thought it was _my_ plan, but it's actually almost entirely his, including starting with Arduino. One of his friends at school filled him in on it--it seems that UConn teaches engineers C programming using Arduino. All I'm trying to do is to give him some fun hardware to play with, since his load this semester is light owing to all the APs he took in high school.
Capiche?
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Hi Phil,
My son (18) has been helping me out while waiting to go to up to Uni. He taught himself C, C++, PHP, Lua etc and who knows what else on a PC but he was keen to get into the embedded stuff. I gave him a little project which was based on modding a customer's design based on a PIC12F510. I'd forgotten just how awful those little PICs are and after he had nearly got this thing going but at only about 1/3 the required speed we swapped to an LPC1111. He found wading through the data and examples to sort out how to get the peripherals to do anything a bit of an eye opener but very nearly as stimulating as staying up till dawn playing computer games or beer. The essence of this is - forget the Arduino - buy an Espresso with the LPC1114 (dead cheap) and play with that - the learning curve *is* steep but no worse than anything else worthwhile (eg swimming, golf, sailing, etc). Even the abortive PIC experience was good - it makes you think very hard about exactly whats going on and what you need (and the life lesson of learning to recognise a dead end didn't hurt). (You could use the change from the $200 to buy him a decent soldering iron and some tools !).
Your son may differ !
Michael Kellett
I agree with wanderer. Math and analysis skill taught in school are very important. I've met several programmers who thought they where bright enough to do without but in reality their work is mediocre at best.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for all the input, guys.
Re whether his doing this is a good idea, the importance of math, and so on:
(a) it's his idea, as I said; UConn has a lot of engineering clubs doing all sorts of projects;
(c) All the best engineers I know have a hobby background;
(c) I'm the one who rubs people's noses in how important it is to do your own math, remember?
and with the best will in the world,
(d) Advice based on zero acquaintance is not the most valuable kind.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
s
arduino is avr, it just has a bootloader and some fancy software wrapped around gcc
so when you want to run on "bare metal" just install win-avr and you are good to go, is probably still the cheapest way to get avr hardware
-Lasse
Nonsense! If you follow that rule you'll actually have an "engineer" that knows something rather than using a uP "hammer" for every task ;-)
I'm presently mentoring such a situation. I have the urge to kill, but they're paying me way too much money for me to suggest a better (analog) solution ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
[On the Road, in New York]
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
I originally learned C from K&R and the book that came with MS C 6.0 for DOS and OS/2. I thought the MS book was actually pretty good--I still have it. I don't know if it's the same as the book you mention, but it's the same compiler, so it might well be.
Most of my programming is embedded these days, though I'm not as fast at it as I am at some other things.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
that may be but, as far as I can read the pic arduino isn't fully compatible with the "real" arduino so it might not work with some shields
and there has been some complaining about microchip trying to get in on the open source movement of arduino but not making their tools open source
-Lasse
is
,Okay I understand better. Sorry if I was out of line. The 'master plan' kind of struck a nerve. I remember trying to survive college while working at a start up part time (6 days a week).
Thanks, Michael, that's good wisdom, and a great story about your son. Congratulate him for me, and I wish him a long and successful career.
It's never wise to stand in someone's way when they've got a fire in their belly about some good and useful thing. I pity folks who have never had that experience.
My own education was pretty much backwards from most folks' who wind up in engineering--I spent my boyhood building published circuits that I mostly didn't understand, out of parts I salvaged from dead TVs. It made me _nuts_ that I didn't know how to design stuff, so I started reading everything I could get my hands on, and scribbling schematics of everything from transceivers to A/D converters, some of which might even have worked. The simpler stuff did work, which felt amazing. I didn't have any test equipment apart from a Radio Shack 50k ohm/volt analogue VOM.
That fire in the belly was really the foundation of my technical career. I've never taken a circuits class, apart from the 2-hours per week, one semester RLC-circuits-for-physicists they make you take in second year, and I could have taught that one by then. (I actually did teach some of the second year physics lab course--e.g. there was an experiment that required designing a bit of combinatoric logic, and the TA had never heard of Karnaugh maps.) My course work for 6-1/2 years was all physics, math, and astronomy (which is also mostly physics but has some instrument-building flavour in spots).
After getting a B.Sc. (hons) in physics and astronomy, I lucked into a job designing time and frequency gear for the first commercial DBS system. They must have been severely stuck for people, because they hired a new grad with only a hobby electronics background to have sole responsibility for the system's high performance, low jitter clocks. Gulp.
On one of the two boards I owned, the noise spec was 5 Hz RMS in 15-100 Hz BW around a 13 GHz carrier, after being multiplied up 120 times from my 110-115 MHz synthesizer, which had to tune in 8.333... kHz increments (1 MHz @ 13 GHz). I had _no_ idea how hard that was when I started--remember this was 1981, long before DDS.
But it eventually worked fine, and actually was the first board released to production for that system, due to that fire in the belly again.
So I understand that there's no substitute for knowing the material (especially the math), but there's also no substitute for a fire in the belly.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Sure, no worries. If I'm making an ass of myself, I'd rather people tell me, even if it's in public. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Thanks. That's how it sounded to me, and the UConn profs involved seem to agree.
Just learning how to control the metal will stand him in good stead--understanding a system from the math and physics, through the circuit design and firmware, to the user interface, and then getting it to work, is about as good an engineering lab exercise as can easily be found. If you pick the right gizmo, it can even be worth money.
He started with gcc under Cygwin, writing code in Notepad (ick) and compiling and linking it manually. "Why does the executable always come out as a.exe?" "Type 'gcc --help' and look for an option to set the output file name'" "Okay, got it."
His new machine doesn't have Cygwin installed yet, but it will eventually. Gizmo-building is such fun, it's really amazing to get paid for doing it.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
=20
Look at some of the Arduino stuff in robotics and radio control = magazines.
?-)
Same here :-) I'd like to add that when you always walk the paths you know you'll end up doing the same over and over. OTOH it does mean that some projects take extra time for reading and experimenting.
This thread reminds me of an intern I coached about a decade ago for his final project. He arrived in an old car complete with the boom-boom-boom noises. He was somehow connected to the boss. When I interviewed him he didn't give me a good feeling. He had a bit of a careless attitude and no real interest in electronics. But we let him start on a difficult project and he really proved me wrong! He just went for the project and even after hitting a dead-end he picked up the pieces and managed to finish the project in time. He was hired shortly afterwards!
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
If he installed the Arduino package he may have more then he thinks. On Windows the IDE is just a veneer over Cygwin and WinAVR. The AVR GCC tool chain is a Cygwin port and the upload to the board is via AVRdude. It also has the Windows port of GNU utilities for AVR and x86.
If he wants to do low level stuff it is all there (somewhat hidden) in the various subdirectories.
If you hold down the shift key when you click the Verify (compile) button it will show the whole script that gets executed in the message area. You can then find the temp directory that has all the preprocessor output and object code.
Again, the thing I like about the Arduino environment is that you can get fairly complex projects going without having to know any of these details, but the full function is there if you need it (or have a morbid curiosity).
I think you cannot go wrong with the Arduinos. Like Apple Ipods, the good thing is not just the products themselves but the industry developing around them. Many "shield" add-ons, plenty of available support, many projects as sources of ideas and inspiration, etc.
But, to explore alternatives:
As Nico suggested, if the boy doesn't already have some electronics know-how under his belt, it may make sense to separate, at list for a while, the tasks of learning C and learning how to interface/control real world hardware.
For the first part, I have not used it personally, but over the years I've read many good comments about MIX's "Power C" (
Environments such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc. have a steeper learning curve and also hide many of the details of a project, obscuring many things that a programmer should know. (Is amazing to me how some people can plung ahead with non-trivial projects without knowing what libraries they are using, or not knowing if a feature they are using is standard or an extension provided by their toolset, etc.)
For the hardware phase, something with motors, servo actuators, etc can provide both instant feedback and instant gratification, beyond what a lame LED can do ;) May I sugest a robot kit like TI's Evalbot?
On the other hand, depending on the personalities involved, Vladimir's school of harsh discpline may work better on the long run ...
-- Roberto Waltman
[ Please reply to the group. Return address is invalid ]Dennis expounded in news:FyT8q.6913$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe19.iad:
The only caution I would add about the Arduino development IDE is that the language isn't fully conforming C/C++. They've added/changed some things to make it "simpler" for students, which is ok in intent, but-
For example: At one point they were seriously discussing that they should change (gcc) something fundamental like the 0377 octal convention to make it easier for students who couldn't figure out that 0010 is not ten.
Some teacher thought this would be a wonderful change and the Arduino folks seemed in favour of this. I spoke against it on several grounds but it fell on deaf ears. Even though I doubt you'll ever see this change (due to the impact on header files etc.), this is the type of thing you may be up against with the Arduino toolchain. They seem just a little too eager to dumb it down, even at the expense of proper language support.
However, it does makes a great place to start.
Once your son figures out how to do everything from Cygwin though, he can do compiles, burns etc. with a Makefile issuing commands. Then he won't need the Arduino version of the compiler any longer. He can then use the Win-AVR suite, which is easy to download/install and includes the real gcc for a "proper" C/C++ language support.
Warren
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