White Paper Discuss: An Introduction to C Programming for First Robotics Applications

[eugenebrooks]

Originally Posted by CD47-Bot

Thread created automatically to discuss a document in the White Papers.

An Introduction to C Programming for First Robotics Applications by eugenebrooks

I have posted a rather long "white paper" with the title listed above with the goal of giving students, and possibly teacher/mentors, a good start with C programming for the robot. This document is not a substitute for the variety of currently available materials devoted to robot programming. Rather, it is designed to compliment them. It describes those portions of the C programming language that you are likely to use in the robot program and how they are used to achieve your goals in code for the control system. It has both tutorial and more sophisticated content.

The tutorial content uses the freely available Extensible Interactive C interpreter, written by Ed Breen, as a vehicle to explore the properties of simple C statements, variable definitions and functions.

The “not-so-tutorial” portion of the content explores binary arithmetic, the relationship between shifts and multiplies, and takes things as far as how to implement fixed-point arithmetic. A library routine (missing from the IFI default code) to print long integers and long integers representing fixed-point is described and is included as source code in the companion EiC distribution.

Any discussion, corrections and suggestions for improvements for the document would be happily received in this thread. As noted, the document is a work in progress and will likely see further improvement before the kickoff in response to any suggestions.

Eugene Brooks