I’m taking an exciting class this semester called Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces. Today was our first lab class where we got our box of inputs and outputs, a breadboard, and an Arduino microcontroller. With these tools I have a way to sense and control things in the physical world with a normal programming environment, which is a step towards the “tangible” interfaces from the class’s name.
TUI, as students call the class, culminates in a final projects that in past years have been a real showcase of creativity: the bubblegum sequencer, Jug Hero, blowing virtual bubbles, and others. I haven’t had my innovative and great idea yet, but since we just got our kits today, I have a bit of time.
Now the main task is to get working with the new hardware and development environment. The language you use to program the Arduino board—also called Arduino—is based on C, which is a more low-level language than I have been using recently. (I spent the summer writing Javascript and Ruby, both of which are very high-level languages). Anyway, typically the first task in any programming language is getting the computer to display the message “Hello world”.
My Physical Computing textbook explains:
Anybody who has learned how to use a couple of different computer systems or programming languages will tell you that the hardest part is getting a computer to do anything at all. … In software, it’s traditional to prove your mastery of any environment by getting your program to say “Hello World!” The “Hello World!” message of the microcontroller is a blinking LED. Once you get the microcontroller to blink an LED, it’s all downhill from there.
But a simple blinking LED didn’t seem like an appropriate start, especially since the newer Arduino boards are programmed at the factory to blink any connected LED. Once I finished fumbling with my breadboard and resistors and finally plugged in all the parts, my light started blinking automatically without me doing any programming at all. I decided that a better start would be to have my light blink “Hello world” in Morse code.
Like almost everyone, I know only enough Morse code to do SOS, and it turns out I was doing even that wrong. Whenever I tap out SOS, I put longer delays between dashes than dots. That’s wrong—the delay between symbols that form a letter is supposed to be constant. The rules for timing are systematic:
International Morse code is composed of five elements:
- short mark, dot or ‘dit’ (·) — one unit long
- longer mark, dash or ‘dah’ (-) — three units long
- intra-character gap (between the dots and dashes within a character) — one unit long
- short gap (between letters) — three units long
- medium gap (between words) — seven units long
I copied this timing information and the codes for all the letters from Wikipedia and implemented them as my first Arduino program. It took a bit longer than I expected because I’m not that familiar with C. Debugging was also tricky because I realized I had no idea what the Morse code for “Hello world” was supposed to look like! While I was debugging, I had to use SOS to see if everything was working properly.
Here’s what the end result looks like:
If you want to see the code behind my Morse, here’s the source. It’s messier than I would like because I couldn’t get sizeof() to operate as I expected.
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