Trustworthy Systems

When the arduino meets year 9

Authors

Peter Chubb and John Judge

NICTA

UNSW

Abstract

During the last two years, NICTA, in conjunction with the University of Sydney, has extended the National Computer Science School to include an embedded systems component.

During the first trial at the end of 2008, we gave each participant an arduino, a breadboard and a handful of components. On-line exercises showed how to wire up a circuit each week, test it, and then gave programming exercises for that circuit. The aim was more to teach C and embedded programming, than to play with hardware; some of the students complained about the problems in wiring up the systems.

For this year, we designed and manufactured a board specifically for this course, based on the Arduino and using the same IDE. The board included a variety of peripherals (LEDs, potentiometers, temperature and inertial sensors, etc), and had a plug to allow it to interface directly with an AIBO.

In this talk, I'll run through what the students did with the course, and show some videos of what they did in the Challenge when they plugged the boards into the Aibo robots.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Chubb_Judge_10,
    address          = {Wellington, New Zealand},
    author           = {Chubb, Peter and Judge, John},
    booktitle        = {Linux.conf.au},
    month            = jan,
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/3461.pdf},
    title            = {When the Arduino meets year 9},
    year             = {2010}
  }

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