Ideas into Action

Last year, I backed a good friend's Kickstarter, for the Mirobot - a small open source, WiFi controlled turtle-like robot to help teach kids to code. It was well received, and well over-funded, and hopefully will be the start of a range of educational technology kits.

During the development of Mirobot, it became clear that a traditional through-hole pcb design, incorporating a DIL-socketed ATmega328, was not the way to go - especially when you could buy a complete Arduino Pro Mini, from China, for less than the cost of the microcontroller over here.

It also became apparent that there were a lot of interesting WiFi and BLE modules - available from China, at very low cost, that really meant that designing your own, was a non-starter. Devices such as the ESP8266 and the HM11 BLE module - that were now made accessible due to an easy to use serial command interface.  Developments such as these are changing the way in which we put hardware together. We buy a bunch of well engineered building blocks, and we stick them together like LEGO.
And just like LEGO - these building blocks are becoming more sophisticated (but cheaper) year on year.

The great thing about LEGO is it's simple User Interface.  Those studs and holes make it so easy to put pieces together - that even a toddler quickly masters the skills required. Well perhaps digital hardware is becoming much like this - but with the one advantage, that those studs and holes can be manipulated in software code to make things fit, in entirely new ways. It's like having an endless supply of Sugru, or 3D printer - from which to mould or print your own LEGO creations.

LEGO can also be used to convey somewhat abstract concepts in computing.  The "one by one" block is the LEGO equivalent of the bit, and by putting these together we can make more interesting blocks - such as the "four by two" or the "eight by one". I'm going to end the analogy here - before I get distracted thinking about teaching binary maths and logical operations in LEGO - that's for another time.

Building Blocks

Every modern digital product is based around a microcontroler, one or more communications interfaces and a power supply.  Indeed, solving how you get the power in and the data out remains one of the most creative challenges to the digital product designer.

So for any product, you have the following common blocks

Microcontroller block
Communications block
Power Supply block

Look at any product - say the Arduino Duemillenove or Uno, and you can clearly identify these parts on the board.  In the case of the Duemillenove, the parts are quite separate, there's the ATmega328, the FTDI chip, and the 5V regulator. The rest is just a few connectors - so that the whole lot plugs together in a useful way.

For those familiar with Arduino - they have learned the functionality of each pin, they know it's limitations, and they know where to find (or write) the code to make that pin work in the desired manner. Learning the capabilities of a 28 pin microcontroller, has been simplified by the Arduino ecosystem - but can easily be extended to highlight the capabilities of microcontrollers with 100 pins or more.

The combination of a hardware abstraction layer - which removes the need to understand, at a register level, the internal structure of the processor, plus a couple of layers of firmware abstraction which lifts the coder well above the machine language of the mcu - mean that the user can rapidly make progress with new creative ideas - without getting bogged down in the intricacies of the microcontroller architecture or machine language. This is what I like about Arduino, and why I think it has made microcontrollers  much more accessible to a whole new generation of programmers.

However, the 8-bit Arduinos have their limitations, and the IDE has been widely criticised - but as with all old friends, you learn to forgive their shortcomings and foibles.

Improving Arduino

For many newcomers, Arduino will be their first introduction to physical computing devices and compiled C and C++ code.  There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Arduino code - it's just a tool to get a job done.  The current IDE does not encourage good programming practice, splitting the task into multiple firmware modules, nor does it allow the user a means to debug or single step the code to identify where problems lie.

It does however have a huge user base, a massive community following and a vast resource of libraries. These are its strong points.

Recent developments have ported the Arduino "language" to a wider range of microcontrollers - including ARM chips from Atmel (Due), Freescale (Teensy) and STMicroelectronics (Maple). Additionally the Arduino language has been ported to FPGAs - such as the Xilinx Spartan 6 - on the Papilio Duo board - where it runs of a 100MHz soft-core - the ZPUino.

These are all great developments, and keeping the Arduino philosophy current and branching out into a wider range of hardware targets. We will perhaps reach the point, where chip suppliers offer their own versions of the Arduino language reference - so that digitalWrite() works on any microcontroller you happen to wish to use.