Today's list

Looking around a bit more at the AVR community, it seems that WinAVR is the most common choice that many use to write C code for the AVR. However, there's not IDE; instead, it uses makefiles. Ouch. Not a good choice for teaching.

I recently did a voice-over for a simulation Buddy produced which shows the behavior of a fiddle string. I found this behavior complex and fascinating. Buddy's working on a version which will show the string in 3-D; below is a 2-D slice. Using Camtasia made is so easy to quickly record this.

I spend some time yesterday evening creating my new personal home page on the web, since my old home page is years out of date. It's fairly simple, but at least a start.

I felt like a kid in a candy store yesterday while order parts for the Summer Bridge program. I hadn't realized that Pololu (named after a valley in Hawaii) offered some many nice robotics parts. I'm also glad I could finally get the order placed; it took a while, but I think I found most of what I need.

Little did I know, but the first annual National Robotics Week will be held from April 10-18!

Today's plan:

1. I still need to update the Micro libs with the bug fix.
2. Spend a small amount of time on p14p. My plan is to put small but steady amounts of time in, since I can't afford to spend a lot of time on it.
3. E-mail as always. I'm mostly caught up, with just a few items to take care of.
4. Call Dan Stutts to finish our earlier conversation. Though not pressing; I can also do that on Wednesday.
5. Research -- I need to review a paper, revise two papers.
6. Funding. I really need to do this, but with other deadlines looming it's not looking like I'll make much progress. Perhaps I can put together one slide or make some other small quanta of progress.
7. Type in corrected Micro grades.
8. Clean up. My office is a dump. Update: better now.

Atmel

A student in Micro asked me if I'd considered Atmel's AVR when choosing a microprocessor for the book. I knew they didn't offer a C compiler and were limited to 8 bits, but little else. I did a bit of research and was impresssed:

• There's one AVR core; the various families (tinyAVR, megaAVR, etc.) add features but share the same core. See the diagram to the right. Nice!
• The AVR instruction set contains two 16-bit pointer registers for indirect addressing, compares and signed/unsigned branches, 16-bit addressing for data, a multiplier, and a stack. It's nice.
• As shown in the overview, there are lots of DIP packages, great for breadboarding.
• There are third-party C compilers, but no well-supported free ones. That's a big minus.

I realized that I need to use tags (i.e. labels to Blogger) to keep track of my posts, so I've started using them.