This post is part of the GaSiProMo challenge. You can read more about this here.
I’ve had a bad experience with Arduino. But perhaps I was just cranky that night. I was also unlucky with a defective Uno.
The good news is that for my new project (which has a deadline), my new Arduino Mega is not in fact defective. I can attest its functionality tonight, at 10:45pm.
This platform is pretty slick. They cleverly have positioned it between full language control and GUI-only. The syntax is mostly C strict. But there are abstracted functions and methods that keep the very low-level hardware constructs from mucking up the works. In a word, Arduino has “de-engineered” the sometimes maddening experience of working in firmware on any given microcontroller.
In mere minutes, I had a PWM signal outputting a nice fade on an LED. This would have taken me a chunk of time on the Atmel micro that is used on the board.
The IDE lacks a lot of polish, but then I suppose that’s not unintentional. IDEs are precisely where a lot of engineers get cranky (see above), and IDEs are not the point of hardware design.
So I don’t have much to update for my project, but this little stepping stone is encouraging and enlightening. Get it? Enlightening?
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