The prerequisite for this course is the Part 1: Electricity and Electronics, or a very good handle on analog electronics and electricity. In this course you will learn digital electronics by building digital electronic circuits. You will then build a mini computer on your breadboard using a microcontroller, effectively a computer on a chip. You’ll program the microcontroller in machine code and learn the basics of computer control and hooking up a computer to the real world. You’ll work up to using an Arduino system which is a microcontroller with open source programming language and a lot of options for interfacing. You’ll control hobby servos (the roboticist’s best friend!), DC motors, stepper motors, and use multiple sensors to read information about the surrounding world.
There will be a companion Digital Electronics kit available for this course and you will use most of the parts from the Analog Electronics kit from Part 1.
Curriculum will include:
What and why digital?
Binary and ASCII
hexadecimal
boolean logic and logic gates
registers, memory/RAM (build a memory)
what is a microprocessor and how does it work?
what is a microcontroller?
programming PIC microcontrollers, using LCD displays and controlling motors and real-world devices, and a whole mess’o projects
Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog conversion
What is Arduino?
programming the Arduino
using LCD touch screens
Building our robot car
various projects including sonar (ultrasonics), infrared remote control and detection, programming our bot, and a whole mess’o projects.
