Another chance is coming and this time,
I am going to be the busiest being on the planet
At least for a month.
Seriously........
That's my one month vacation which comes once in a semester and I've got lots and lots of plans. Before discussing plans, let me update you with what happened to me recently.
After the post 'Hitman Blood Money', interesting things happened. Two months ago I bought a microcontroller board called Arduino. It's a PCB board with all support hardware needed to do physical computing, more specifically building embedded systems. These can be classified as computers for real life application as they need very little memory and few megahertz of clock cycles at very affordable cost to develop. The software to program Arduino can be downloaded free of cost. The best thing about Arduino is its wide spread fan community and hardware support from many third party vendors.
Surprisingly after a month I stumbled upon a book titled 'Make: AVR programming' in books section of Arduino site. Before this I spent few weeks reading about how to program and how this board works. I also know that the chip they say is its heart is Atmega328. This chip does all core functions whatever the board does. This means you can simply use the chip and without any need of the board. Best thing about dealing just with single chip is bare minimum cost of the chip and its support hardware.
Then I decided to get into this transition from third party-aided development to bare chip development and started learning embedded C(variant of C language structured for microcontroller purposes). Two weeks ago I had to head out of campus to buy an AVR chip and breadboard(I am still angry on my teacher for not returning back the semester project which I did on my most cherished breadboard). Also I bought inertial measurement unit(IMU) for my upcoming quadcopter project(I may face funding problem here...... I am not rich).
The above mentioned book is really great and it opened my eyes. I started right away and the night after returning back, I 'flashed' my first C program into the chip's memory. Below is the result. LED next to the chip was blinking and I jumped. Next step is following the book and learning to get to know everything that can be squeezed out of this microcontroller. Doing this can help me create whatever I can imagine. There are no limits for Imagination.
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| Here I use Arduino to act as communication interface between my AVR microcontroller and computer |
>Learn AVR programming.
>Make an ISP device to replace Arduino in the picture above.
>Make and test induced lucid dreaming machine what I heard being called Kvasar.
>Learn to make custom PCB designs with EAGLE and try my hand in PCB fabrication.
>I have problem waking up at right time. A waking machine can help me do that.
>Build head mounted magnifying glasses that magnify using motor control. Fine adjustment.
>Make a prototype of something that solves piano tiles android app, substituting human fingers.
>Quadcopter(should go smooth if there is no funding problem).
These should keep me busy for a month I guess.
I will keep updating about the progress here.
Goutham
