Serial

It’s midterm season, and it’s taking a toll on everyone. I took screenshots and photos of my labs, but can’t muster up much to say about them.

The first lab was a fairly straightforward introduction to serial communication and particularly the notion of character encoding and representation; along with understanding binary vs decimal vs hex, it’s the most review of my CS degree we’ve tackled so far in PComp. It can still be a little tricky for me to remember what a bit is versus a byte versus a nibble; I’m usually a pretty high-level programmer.

The second lab connected P5 to the Arduino via serial connections; this was far more expressive than the serial monitor.

I waived ICM and haven’t touched P5 before these labs, so I decided to do a creative application to get myself accustomed to it. I had to learn the frustrations of everyone else. Personally, I think P5 is a poor choice for learning to programming; you spend a lot of time thinking about coordinates in a way that you won’t necessarily need to in many programming languages (granted, you do have to do so if you’re doing primarily graphics, but I don’t think most programmers do.) In any case, here’s my little house. It is sunny when you leave the photoresistor uncovered, turns cloudy when it’s partially covered, and becomes night when it’s fully covered.

I didn’t do a great job of documenting here– my hand is mostly out of frame. I think you can still get the gist of it, though.