Now that all the practicalities of getting support are out of the way, it’s time to have a look at the objectives of the embedded systems and sensors assignment, as part of the Interaction technology course.
The formal objectives are as follows:
- To acquire basic soldering skills. Being able to solder will come in handy at times during the rest of your lifetime. Furthermore, soldering your own microcontroller board will make you feel comfortable handling electronic components.
- To learn the basic properties of the most common electronic components and to be able to build basic electronic circuits on a breadboard, using these components together with a microcontroller, as well as to get to know different sensors and actuators, of different complexity, and to be able to sense and manipulate the analog world around you using these sensors and actuators.
- To learn to program a microcontroller and learn about its possibilities (I/O pins, communication protocols, memory types, interrupts) and limitations (memory size, single threadedness), as well as to gain knowledge of a number of microcontroller specific topics (delays, timers, scheduling, interrupts, debouncing, timer roll-over),
- To learn to build an embedded system that interfaces with an existing device, as well as to learn to make choices in light of a limited supply of hardware resources and stringent functional requirements, in order to finally arrive at a smart and – most importantly – interactive system, featuring a pleasant UX.
- To learn to research and understand user needs for a specific interactive device and prepare a context of user and requirements specification.
- To generate quick feedback and items for improvement using heuristic evaluation.
But in fact it all boils down to:
- To have fun exploring the world of physical computing and to experience how easy (and difficult at the same time) it is to interface to the real world with sexy input and output devices, instead of that same old keyboard, mouse and monitor.