Programming Video Resources
Arduino Control Flow
Let's go over how an Arduino program executes sequentially and how it can be visualized in flowchart form by examining the ever popular Blink example. You can follow along with an Arduino and the Arduino development environment: Installing Arduino IDE
Arduino Programming Syntax
Knowing how to properly format your code is essential to having a program compile and run correctly. The set of rules defining how to format, spell, and structure your code is known as "syntax," and it's what we cover in this episode of Adventures in Science as we continue talking about computer science. We look at the history of the C and C++ languages and how to apply syntax rules to an Arduino program.
Arduino Data Types, Literals, and Variables
This episode of Adventures in Science, we examine the various data types in Arduino and how to use literals and variables. While there are only 3 fundamental data types in C, Arduino supports many more. You can also extend various data types by adding keywords like "long" to create a "long int" that uses 4 bytes (instead of 2 in most systems).
Arduino Arithmetic Operators
Now let's dive a little deeper and look at the various arithmetic operators in C and C++, specifically, as they're used in the Arduino environment. There are only 6 main operators: assignment, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulo. We also look at compound assignment operators; how they can be used to perform a math operation on a variable and then store the result back in the same variable.
Arduino Conditional Statements
We examine the ever-important conditional statement, which for C, takes the form of if/else/then. In order to use them effectively, you'll need to know how to use the relational operators, which compare two numbers (e.g. are two numbers equal?). Knowing these can help you do things like see if a button has been pushed in Arduino.
Arduino Logic Operators
We go over the basic Boolean operators in C and how to use them to make compound conditional statements. When dealing with Boolean logic, we must assume that variables can only have one of two values: true or false. From there, we have three fundamental operators: NOT, AND, OR. We can combine them to make other operations, like exclusive OR (XOR). Using these operators, we can make compound conditional statements to do things like look for the moment when a button was pushed.
Arduino Loops
Let's look at loops in Arduino. Specifically, we look at "while," "do while," and "for" loops and how to apply them in our programs. In essence, loops allow us to execute chunks of code repeatedly without needing to copy and paste. They also change the flow of the program, and we can change the way loops execute by modifying their conditions as well as using the "break" and "continue" statements.