The following is an example of a main project for the EECS 1021 course. While I think that it's important to provide concrete examples it's also important not to provide examples that are trivial to copy and, thus, reduce the effectiveness of the example as a learning tool. As such, I'm providing this example using […]
My colleague, Eric Prandovszky, has been discussing the M5Stack system with me for a while and acquired a few modules to us to try out. Today I tried out the M5Stack Core 2 AWS module. My objective is to see if we can program it using the legacy Arduino 1.x IDE on macOS with Apple […]
For students attempting to get the USB drivers working for the Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino please follow these instructions: First: make sure that you're not using the white USB cable. Use a different one. Second: install the USB driver for the board. a) Go to Seeed Studio's wiki: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Grove-Beginner-Kit-For-Arduino/ b) click on the USB driver […]
Before we started using Firmata and Firmata4j in the EECS 1021 class, Richard Robinson and I put together lab activities that used the Fazecast jSerialComm library paired with customized Arduino serial code. The approach is summarized in three videos: Video 1: The Plan for Sending Data to an Arduino We need to send information, in […]
In the EECS 1021 class here at York University the students learning about object oriented programming in an engineering that uses sensors and actuators. We use Arduino devices that host a special pre-made firmware called Firmata to do this in order to unburden the students from the C++ coding that would otherwise be required on […]
I use Arduino-compatible hardware in two of the engineering programming classes that I teach here at York University. Rather than program the boards directly, I have the students install a little program on the Arduinos that can communicate with the programs that the students actually write on their own computers. For the first course, the […]
The SIMAVR package is for simulating AVR processors like the ATMEGA328 on the Arduino UNO. I'm looking to try to use it with VPL in courses like our computer architecture class, EECS 2021, as a way of simulating the UNO's processor in exercises involving assembler and C programming. On a Mac, we use HomeBrew. The […]
In my EECS 1021 class, in which we connect Java programs on a Mac or Windows machine with programs running on an Arduino-compatible board, we generally use Firmata. When combined with a library like Firmata4j (Java) or pyFirmata (Python), or Arduino-Octave (Matlab), Firmata provides an easy-to-use pathway for this to happen. It is, however, a […]
Arduino devices are commonplace in Engineering programs. Even if the profs don't use them, the students do. In Engineering programs, we often need to set up sensor monitoring or motor control systems. If students haven't worked with these in the first through third years of their programs, they are likely to encounter them in the […]
Firmata is a set of Arduino projects that are aimed at helping solve a particular class of problems with embedded devices: having a main computer send and receive data from an Arduino, typically in a simple control or data-logging application. This is similar to how people use the Arduino support for Matlab. In Java we […]