Microcontroller Lab - SARCNET

This activity introduces the concept of a microcontrollers and programming and provides practice in its use.

We think the best way to get into microcontrollers and programming is to get hands-on experience right from the beginning. Unlike other computers, microcontrollers work directly with all your electronic devices, sensors and actuators. So, to get started, we connect an LED to show how easy it is to control something. Setting up your Arduino microcontroller and the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is also straightforward. We like to see our students doing the downloading and installation too. Entering a simple program, in Arduino language this is called a sketch, compiling it and uploading it, is also very instructive. The lesson is that we don't have to learn to program before seeing what a microcontroller can do. Infact there are many complete example programs to choose from. You can load and run them without any programming experience whatsoever.

Of course, this is just the begining. We can use this simple microcontroller setup to learn how to write our own programs and we can use it for many different electronics projects. Once we have completed this activity, we invite interested students to attend our Microcontroller Workshop and our Object Oriented Programming Workshop. These hands-on workshops introduce them to the C and C++ programming language. We found that teaching students, some as young as 5 years old, how to program using OOP techniques and C++ is just as easy as teaching them to write "spaghetti" code in C. The advantages of OOP in terms of modularity, reuseability, maintainability, extensibility and portability should never be underestimated. Learning how to program correctly, from the start, is really going to save students completely re-leaning the proper techniques later. We say no to "scratching" around and we get going with C++ on day 1.