Microcontroller 101 Class - hey, that was pretty fun.

[Phil]

Hi,

I took the Microcontrollers class today, and it was pretty good.

I think the most important thing I learned was that it isn't that hard
to get started with MCUs, and I have some sense of how to get to the
next step with hardware.
Still have a lot to learn though.

Thanks to Akiba for teaching the class and breaking it down into bite
size chunks.

Phil

[Akiba]

I'm actually writing a blog post about it right now. I learned something
very important in that class. When I did the electronics class, I assumed
that a lot of theory was required in order to work on electronics. I
structured this class differently where I just had a bunch of labs and I was
more of a lab assistant. I barely taught anything about theory and even the
C language, other than what was needed to get through the next lab exercise.
Anything I thought I wanted to say was contained in the lab notes. I was
really shocked.
Once people typed in the code, built it, downloaded it, and saw it working,
then everyone would start playing with it and customizing it. Questions came
up naturally rather than me trying to force it down people's throats. I had
to almost forcefully stop people from tweaking their code just to get the
class to move on.
This was a pretty important lesson for me. I think in the future, I'm going
to structure classes where people have more control over the information
they receive (details will be in the lab notes) and can do things
themselves. I'm going to try and be more of a tutorial guide that's just
there to answer questions and help with the labs.

And by the way, I thought it was funny how Phil and Chris (new Chris from
Australia) started IM'ing each other once they got their wireless links up.
It's a much different application of a wireless node than I had expected :)

Akiba
FreakLabs Open Source Zigbee Project
Web: http://www.freaklabs.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/freaklabs

[Chris]

Hi, it's "new Chris from Australia" here. I just wanted to thank
Akiba for running a great class - it's definitely piqued my interest
in microcontrollers! The balance between theory and hands on was
about right - you gave us just enough knowledge to let us work through
the next lab.

The other thing I liked was that labs got concrete results quickly so
we could see what is possible. I'm a software guy, so being able to
bridge the gap into controlling physical things was really rewarding.
As a plus, it gave my rusty hex arithmetic skills a good workout :)

By the end of the class we were controlling servo motors, so you could
even start to imagine how one might go about building simple robots.
So, the next step for me will be to work out how to get a kit like
this running at home on my Mac.

Thanks again Akiba - looking forward to the next installment!

Chris

[Akiba]

Hey new Chris from Australia,
Nice to see you on the list. As I mentioned yesterday, if you want to do
people detection, you can use a PIR motion sensor (passive infrared). They
sell them in modules in Akihabara. They just output 1 or 0 based on whether
motion was detected so you can just poll an I/O pin to see what the value
is. I'm assuming you know how to do that now. Interrupts and interrupt
service routines will be in the next class :)

Here's the link:
http://akizukidenshi.com/catalog/g/gM-02471/