An introduction to Arduino micro-controller platform and C programming meant for the board. Introduction to debugging and hardware specification and limitations of the board.

1. INTERNET OF THINGS:
ARDUINO AND C
PROGRAMMING
COMBINING THE TANGIBLE AND THE VOLATILE INTO ONE
Punit Goswami

2. ARDUINO ENVIRONMENT
THE ARDUINO BOARD, ITS SOFTWARE COMPONENT AND OTHER ADD-ON HARDWARE

3. ARDUINO DEVELOPMENT BOARD
• Eight bit microcontroller – brain of the board
• USB Port – to communicate with the desktop/laptop
• USB controller chip – manages USB transferred data
• IO pins – board’s connection to the outside world
• Quartz oscillator – board’s time keeper
• Reset button – taking the board back to its initial state
• External power jack – power from dedicated source
Co-axial jack, but USB can also be used

4. INPUT/OUTPUT PINS (I/O PINS)
 Top and bottom rows of the board
 Holes in the board which we can stick wires in
 Holes are connected to the chips through traces on-board
 14 Digital I/O pins on top [0-13]
Highs – 5 volts Lows – 0 volts Max Current - 40 mA
 6 Analog input pins on the bottom [A0 – A5]
 Power output pins on the bottom [ 5v , 3.3 v ]
 Reset pin to reset the board to initial state

5. MICROCONTROLLERS
 Two microcontrollers on the board
 Main ATmega328 – 8 bit microcontroller
User programmable, runs user-written application code
Carries firmware, like bootloader
 ATmega16U2
Handles the communication with the USB interface, not
directly accessible

6. STORAGE & MEMORY
 Non-volatile flash memory for storage
 32 kilobytes in size
 Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) for memory (volatile)
 3 kilobytes in size

7. CLOCK
 16 MHz clock speed ~ 16 million operations per second
 Helps synchronize all components together
 Keeping track of occurrence of events

8. PROGRAMMING FIRMWARE
 The ISCP headers can be used to program the firmware on
the board
 ICSP1 for the main ATmega328 microcontroller
 ICSP2 for the ATmega16U2 microcontroller
 Special equipment are required in order to re-program the
firmware through these headers

9. SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT
• Arduino IDE – Integrated Development Environment
• Can be programmed using other IDEs too, like Eclipse
• Arduino IDE is more versatile
• Needs no special drivers or additional components
• Available for Windows, Linux and Mac
• Cross compiler – compiles for a different target platform than the one being programmed on

10. IDE – SOFTWARE TOOL FOR PROGRAMMING
 File operations and other general options on top
 Buttons for most commonly used options (Verify, Upload, etc.)
 Main window – Text editor for writing code
 Message area – for messages to the programmer

11. OPTIONS BUTTONS
Buttons on the top have the most common ,useful operations
 Verify – compiles the code and checks for errors
 Uploads – compiles the code, uploads it to the board. Works only
if the board is connected
 New – creates a new sketch, a new program
 Open – opens an existing sketch
 Save – saves the current sketch in the directory of your choice
 Serial Monitor – opens window to communicate with the board

12. TARGET PLATFORM
• ATmega328 – Arduino Uno’s processor
• Arduino shields – add on hardware for specific purposes
• Shields need no complicated circuitry – prewired
• Stacks of shields on top of the Arduino
• Prefabricated libraries of methods

13. ARDUINO SHIELDS
The prominent reason that Arduino got so popular
 Additional hardware to do particular, complex tasks
 Form of separate boards
 Pre-wired pins that stick into holes in Arduino
 Stack on top of the Arduino to make connections
 Pre-written functions for operations of these boards
 Open-source designs in most of the cases, third party
Complete list of shields at http://www.shieldlist.org

14. OPEN SOURCE
• Hardware – the board’s design is open source
http://www.arduino.cc
• Software – the IDE is open source, written in Java, modifiable, redistributable
• Open source community – easily available codes and help on troubleshooting

15. SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT
LEARNING TO CODE IN C/C++ FOR ARDUINO

16. RUNNING IDE ON WINDOWS
 Emacs or NotePad++ text editor
 Gcc C compiler
 The debugger, gdb
IDE provides one-stop solution

17. ARDUINO IDE
 Require Java Runtime Environment
 Write codes in general C language
 setup() – Initiates the variables and sets up device instances
 loop() – Runs the code that contains operations and
manipulations, iterates infinitely

18. BLINK LED EXAMPLE
 Pin 13 is represented by numeral 13
 digitalWrite() writes voltage values to pins
 delay() sets delays in milliseconds
 HIGH – 5v LOW – 0v

19. ARDUINO PROGRAMS AND THE BUILD PROCESS
HOW IT IS SAME BUT DIFFERENT TO CODE FOR THE BOARDS

20. Source
code
Executable
file
Hex file
Uploaded
to board
ARDUINO TOOLCHAIN
Steps taken post code authoring
 Source code(sketch) is compiled to an executable format
 Executable file is linked with libraries and interpreted into a
hex file
 Hex file is uploaded to board
Starts executing right away

21. CROSS COMPILATION
Compile on one machine, but the target is another machine.
E.g.: compiling it on an Intel processor, compiling it for an AVR processor
 avr-gcc – C compiler for AVR targets, gives a *.o file
 avr-lnk – links library object files, results in a *.elf file
 avr-objcopy – change the *.elf file into Arduino compatible *.hex file

22. DEBUGGING AND TROUBLESHOOTING
REMOVING ERRORS AND TAKING CARE OF REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE

23. DEBUGGING
• Finding reasons of erroneous execution or failure of execution
• Software problems
• Require ‘controllability’ and ‘observability’
• Controllability: the ability to control sources of data that are used by the system
Allows to do testing to test certain circumstances that might be causing a bug or triggering a bug at
any rate
• Observability: the ability to observe intermediate and final results
An oscilloscope, multi-meter, or the serial monitor could be used

24. REAL TIME MONITORING
• Includes dynamic observation of the target and its state
• Viewing data about the execution as it occurs
• Not intrusive in terms of performance
• Important for timing constraint IoT systems
• Provides timing and functional accuracy

25. REMOTE DEBUGGING
Remote Debugger
• Host computer acts as debugger for a code that runs on the remote target system
• Host computer are also the systems that the programmer programs on
• Host provides the platform to interface with the debugging environment.
• Provides good run control, not good for testing timing
Embedded Debug Interface
• Seen in modern processors, Arduino and its likes have trace macrocells
• Built in to the processor
• Hardware dedicated to do debugging directly

26. SERIAL PROTOCOLS FOR DEBUGGING
• UART: Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter, an old protocol, still useful though.
• Low hardware overhead
• Transmits at 9600 baud
• START and STOP buts are used for synchronization
• The bits in between a START bit and the next STOP bit is the data
• To distinguish, the receiver samples at 16 times higher rate than the baud rate
• Serial interface can be used to both send data to and from the Arduino board