Programming

Uses

A PD controller can be used in a real-time on a robot where a goal value can be both measured and controlled. A PD control is robust, which means that it can overcome unexpected behavior. 

For example, a PD controller could be used in the cruise control on a car. The driver decides the goal speed and the controller in the car could see how fast the car is going, since cars have a speedometer. Under ideal conditions, all it would take to maintain speed is to keep the engine throttled at a predetermined constant amount. However, many unforseable factors can change how much gas is needed to maintain speed. For example, the quality of the gas, engine temperature, road incline, and wind speed. A controller needs to be able to overcome these unpredictable or difficult to measure sources of error to maintain a given speed and accelerate or decellerate as needed.

Introduction

JavaScript is an actual programming language that is interpreted and run by your browser. It makes a webpage interactive and dynamic instead of just a rigid page that doesn't change once it's loaded. You can use it to send and recieve bits of information without having to load another page.  It allows you to drag and drop elements, or react to clicks and hovers. You can even use it to make an in-browser game.

It is syntactically similar to Java. It requires semi-colons at the end of each statement. However, it does not have rigid data types. Any variable can store data of any type - sort of like python. In fact, a variable can even store a function or actually contain nothing (undefined).

Introduction

htmlTagName, #idname, .classname {
   stylename: stylevalue;
   color: black;
   font-size: 12px;
   background-color: #ddd;
}

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. In HTML, you use it to apply a certain look to specific elements in the page. CSS makes it easy to give every page on your website a unified appearance. The format is extremely straightforward, but to be effective you need to know how to specify which element you want styled, find current styling information in a webpage, and you must be aware of all of the styles that can be applied to an element. The general form of a style in a CSS file is like the example shown to the right.

An SVG is a type of graphic that is defined by shapes and math instead of discrete pixels. So, it is scales nicely, but can't make photo-realistic images. An (currently) SVG is two dimensional. That does not mean, though, that we cannot represent 3D information in this 2D space. After all, it is shown in 2D anyway. To accomplish this, we will build our own 3D rotation matrices, and a 3D to 2D projection matrix. The 3D points can be multiplied by both of these matrices to make it appear 3D, albeit somewhat flat due to the orthographic projection.

Introduction

Programming is becoming more useful in a variety of fields. There are a lot of uses, but we are most interested in robotics applications. Microcontrollers like the Arduino are programmed in C++, which is undoubtedly the most widespread language. It is powerful, fast, and easier to use than some earlier languages. However, it is not the easiest language to learn. It has a very strict syntax and the errors can be hard to understand. It is still worthwhile to learn due to its usefullness.

If you are just interested in learning programming in general, I highly recommend looking at Codecademy, which is an excellent interactive environment for learning for the first time. Of their courses, Javascript is most similar to C++, but Python is the easiest and most powerful choice. 

The Basics

Programming is actually quite simple. There are really only a few things that you need to know to get started.

• Data is stored in "variables"
• The right hand side of an equals sign goes into the storage with the name at the left 
• There are different kinds of variables that contain different kinds of information
• A program is executed top down
• Each line is terminated by a semi colon
• Comments are ignored ( lines that begin with two slashes: // )
• There are three fundamental actions that alter the top-down flow:
• Conditions: do something only if something else is true
• Loops: do something repeatedly
• Functions: do a group of things and get a result

Introduction

HTML is the language that your browser reads when it shows you a webpage. It is a variant of XML.  It makes the actual content that you see, but also can contain visual styling information (typically in the form of an external CSS file) and also can have an in-browser (client-side) programming language called JavaScript.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Minimal</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Hello World!</p>
  </body>
</html>

Tag Structure

Tags are put on either end of something to describe the content between the tags. Since HTML is visual, think of a tag as a box drawn around whatever is inside of it. The outermost tags are <HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY>. The <HTML> tag simply says that the contents are HTML. It is the very outermost box on the screen. The <HEAD> tag is invisible. It summarizes the contents (like title and keywords) and also lists files the page needs like stylesheets and scripts - both of which can alternatively be embedded into the actual HTML file if desired instead of being a seperate file. The <BODY> tag is where the actual content that you see on in the browser window goes. It can contain images, text, and other containers.

Introduction

Sometimes it is necessary to turn character arrays into floats. However, precision can be an issue when using some of the current functions. The following function turns character arrays into a float that is split from the front half and the back half. This is one method for a more precise float.

Introduction

There are times when a string is recieved, but rather than the entire string, just a piece of the string is desired. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a simple way to handle strings in C++. Therefore, I have devised a way to split a string based on comma separation.

This way of splitting strings is rather crude and refinement for it will be worked on, but for immediate use, the current function is given with two examples of how it can be altered and used.

Introduction

Reading numbers from serial on an Arduino is needed surprisingly commonly. Exactly what is happening might be kind of hard to figure out.

Serial

Serial communication is digital, which means all data is transmitted in 1's and 0's. Typically, serial communication is done using ASCII letters. This means that, to send a number to the Arduino, the data sent is not the binary version of the number in base 2 (as an integer), but instead a sequence of characters for each digit in base 10 (which is human-readable). It is not an efficient use of bandwidth, but bandwidth is not usually a problem with Arduinos connect by USB.

Introduction

Arduino has floats that are only accurate to about 6-7 digits. When combined with the fact that floats cannot represent certain decimal values well ( like .1 or .3 ) because they are expressed as negative powers of base 2, you may often see error - especially when full value is printed, or the output is truncated instead of rounded.

I have written a class here that basically stores a whole number into a long. Similar to a float, there is even an "exponent" field that says where the decimal point is in the whole number. Unlike a float, operations are done in base 10 (onto a base 2 number). In exchange for the flexibility of true floating point number in the range of possible values, we gain greater precision in the nearer to zero area - the area firmly within the range of the long (-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647). The smaller the left hand side (LHS) of the decimal place is, the more precision is available for the right hand side (RHS) of the decimal.