Microcontrollers - Anders Priest

Attending

About 20 people.

Anders Priest

Anders is a graduate student in nuclear engineering at Berkeley.

Microcontrollers

Circuit boards, arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s, oh my! Microcontrollers and similar digital devices enable you to sense and control the physical world using nothing but your programming skills.

Notes

Microcontrollers are small computers that range in size and scale. Some are more sophisticated than others.

They are found in a variety of devices - cars, microwaves, remote controls, digital clocks, etc. They are also used in industry and medicine.

The Arduino produces its own IDE, which is fairly simple to use. The two necessary functions are setup() and loop(). Programs have to be written on a separate computer, however.

The Raspberry Pi is somewhat more sophisticated and runs a stripped-down version of Linux. You can do things like run Python scripts on the RPi.

Components to use with microcontrollers include:

• the usual analog suspects (wires, resistors, etc.)
• sensors (accelerometers, thermistors, joysticks, etc.)
• “shields” are devices to mount on Arduino microcontrollers (for ethernet, WiFi, etc.)

The nuclear engineering department is working on a dosimeter network using Raspberry Pi devices.

The Internet has a lot of great resources if you’re interested in working with and learning about microcontrollers.

Today’s presentation was brought to us on a Raspberry Pi! Neat.

Lightning Talks

None today.