Writing assembler code is hard, for a few reasons. First, the lack of abstraction forces you to think about each and every step of your program. Second, the lack of abstraction requires you to know a great deal about the hardware. Then, the grammar is just weird. You might write it from left to right […]
GitHub is a good way to collaborate on shared software projects if you're looking for an off-site, third-party system for storing and sharing the code. The repositories on the GitHub site can be either private or public, but they are available to the company that owns GitHub, Microsoft. I use MCUXpresso on macOS to develop […]
Microcontrollers are usually programmed in C, a traditional programming language that dates back to the 1970s. Here I'll talk about a specific type of microcontroller family, the PIC16 (or PIC18) and the compiler options for it. XC8 supports C89, C90 and C99 (for PIC16/18) When programming an 8-bit PIC like a PIC16 or PIC18, it's […]
RISC-V processors, like ARM processors, are complex beasts, making them challenging to teach with. When teaching with them it's important to have appropriate development tools to reflect the immediate pedagogical goals but also to provide students with a pathway for further learning and application. When I teach courses on computer architecture, like EECS 2021 at […]
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 […]
The following is an example of the files needed to create a working Virtual Programming Lab exercise for Java: vpl_run.sh vpl_evaluate.sh MainClass.java StudentSolution.java TeacherReferenceSolutions.java TheTestClass.java With this you can evaluate one student submission against a single reference solution. Two methods are run: one is the student's method and one is the teacher's method. The output […]
A few of my colleagues here at YorkU have expressed an interest in using Python with Virtual Programming Lab on our Moodle-based eClass Learning Management System. I don't have a lot of Python experience, having only really used it for some data processing and toy embedded system demonstrations in the past. So I adapted the […]
The VPL server in the YorkU EECS department was recently updated (2022/23). This had a small impact on existing VPL scripts. With Java, any script that uses JUnit needs to have its vpl_run.sh and vpl_evaluate.sh scripts updated. Here, I have the run script do the JUnit test directly. The evaluate script does JUnit through the […]
In our first year programming class for engineering students, EECS 1021, we're using modern features like jShell and var. Unfortunately, the OS that our VPL instance sits on came with an older version of Java, so we've had to modify our scripts to point to the Java 17 JDK. If you get an error like […]
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 […]