Programming - Getting Started

[Budster]

I had some students that had the fundamentals of C and how to program it. They could build "hello world" programs with ease. But they quickly got lost when trying to implement the hardware control logic in C to use sensors or manipulate motors/actuators/etc.

In my first year as rookie mentor, what I found the hardest was that I spent 80% of my time trying to figure out how the hardware worked and how to program it to work effeciently. I spent 1% of my time helping write and debug C code and 19% of my time trying to figure out what the pecular limitations of the C implementations were and why sometimes the compiler generated some "unusual" and long/complex sequences of assembler.

I've been trying to put together a presentation on programming the hardware with examples to help out - but it quickly gets overwhelming and I have to start again.

Although you do have to start by learning the C language and how to construct programs... understanding which bits to twiddle and when to do so to control things seemed to take a lot more of the time than ramping up on C. In this respect the PIC18C and PIC18F manuals became my bed time reading for most of last year.

I am planning on spending some time this year teaching how to read hardware specifications to help students decipher some things on their own.

Bud