Embedded programming

Assignment for week eight (March 19, 2014)

This assignment for this week is to read a microcontroller datasheet and to program the board to something, with as many different programming languages and programming environments as possible.
I opted to use the Arduino IDE to achieve my assignment. I found Arduino to be easy to learn, considering that I am not a fan of programming and haven't done it in a long time. I tried C programming language in the assignment, however I ran into issues and errors and found it too frustrating - thus I stuck with arduino.

1. Downloading & Installing Arduino IDE

•  I made use of Anna's tutorial (fabacademy.org/archives/content/tutorials/09.Embedded_Programming/Programming_ATtiny_with_Arduino_IDE.html
• Went on http://htl.media.mit.edu/?p=1695 to get downloading instructions for required files/ software
• downloaded Arduino 1.0.5 for Mac OSX
• Unzipped the files & installed the software
• I needed to a Java SE6 runtime, to anable access to Arduino.app

• Initially, I couldn't download the Attiny board files from the gitHub repository - got an error
• I reviewed one of the 2013 students site/ archives and managed to download the files from his link

3. Locating Arduino Sketchbook folder

• This was under the "Documents" folder on my machine
• I then created a new sub-folder called "Hardware"
• Restarted Arduino development environment and I could see ATtiny entries in the Tools>Board menu

4. Connecting ATtiny

• Since well I did not have the FTDI cable, I used the standard USB 2.0 A cable, which I modified to power my Hello LED + Button board.

• I connected the programmer to the ISP header on the LED+Button board

5. Configuring the ATtiny to run @ 20MHz

• By setting the "ATtiny 44 20MHz Clock" from the board's menu on Arduino

6. Burning the Bootloader

• I used my Mac book for this process
• I ran the "Burn Bootloader" command from the tools menu, which ran successfully

• Opened the "Button Sketch" from examples to modify my code
• Changed the pin numbers on the code to correspond to that pf my board (i.e. LED - pin 7 & Button - pin 3)
• Selected the appropriate programmer from Board menu (i.e. USBtinyISP)
• Uploaded teh sketch to my board

8. Modifying Code

• I modified the code so that the LED only goes ON when the Button is pressed
• This was achieved by copying the "LED OFF until Button Pressed" code from Anna's tutorial and including the following line on the code:
• "digitalWrite(buttonPin, HIGH);