#Microcontroller Lab1

This lab is an introduction to Arduino Microcontrollers. In this lab, you will be familiarized with the Arduino platform, and how do develop for it. Arduinos are an open source microcontroller, developed to democratize access to microcontrollers.

Arduionos are controlled through sketches, which are the arduino code format. A sketch has two parts, setup() and loop(). setup is code that runs once, on startup, while loop runs infinitely, continuously repeating. You can think of loop() as a while(True) loop. This is where program logic should go.

Note on the arduino language from the arduino website:

The Arduino language is based on C/C++. It links against AVR Libc and allows the use of any of its functions; see its user manual for details. 

To learn about the arduino platform, we will be doing a series of labs. For today's lab (Lab1), we will be using the following parts:

Red LED
Potentiometer
Several Resistors
Push Button

First Component

The first lab component is learning to make an LED blink with the arduino. To do this, we use the digital I/O of the arduino to set pin 13 high. To accomplish this, we use the method digitalWrite(PIN, STATE). This method can set the selected PIN to be either HIGH (5v), or LOW (GND). Through

digitalWrite(13, HIGH) 

we can set pin 13 high, which is 5v on standard arduinos (some arduino variants operate at 3.3 V but we won't be using those for these labs).

Second Component

The second component is to learn about arduino logic and learning to use input as well as output. We will be using several methods, primarily digitalRead(IN_PIN). This method reads the state of a pin as either HIGH, or LOW, similar to the output digitalWrite(). Through

state = digitalRead(13);

we set the variable state to the value retrieved through digitalRead(13), which is the value of pin 13.

We will expand upon the basic premise of the Second Component by adding a Serial Monitor to the arduino code, so we can see the state of the system on our computer. This will also introduce us to an important concept called Debouncing, which you will discover more about in the second exercise of this component. This will also introduce you to Boolean Logic on an Arduino.

Third Component

In the third component, we will be using a potentiometer to control the brightness of an LED. The LED is controlled via PWM, and the analog potentiometer input values are transmitted to our computers using the built in Serial Monitor

Closing thougts

This is the basics of using an arduino. Through this, you can create almost anything by building with these building blocks, Digital I/O, Analog I/O, and the Serial interface.