RP6 ROBOT SYSTEM - 4. Programming the RP6
4.4. C – Crash Course for beginners
This chapter only provides
a very short introduction to C-pro-
gramming
, discussing only the absolutely required minimum
amount of things used for RP6. This section has to be seen as an
overview of general possibilities and methods of C. We will present a
few examples and basics, but further investigation on these topics is
up to the reader!
So this chapter is not more than a tiny crash course. A
complete
introduction is far
beyond the scope of this
manual
and would require rather thick textbooks. Luckily the
market provides a great number of good books on this topic.
A few
may be viewed online free of charge.
4.4.1. Literature
The following books and tutorials describe C-programming mainly for PC and other
large computers. A lot of details in these tutorials do not apply to AVR
microcontrol-
lers – the language is the same, but most libraries for typical PC-usage are a bit too
large for small 8 bit microcontrollers. The best example may be the “printf” function,
a must have on a PC! The “printf” function is available for microcontrollers as well, but
it requires a lot of memory space and execution time, so we do not prefer to use this
function. Instead we will show some more effective alternatives for our applications.
Some
C Tutorials / Online-books (just a very small selection):
http://www.its.strath.ac.uk/courses/c/
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/notes/top.html
http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/CTutorial/CTutorial.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C
http://www.le.ac.uk/cc/tutorials/c/
http://stuff.mit.edu/iap/c/CrashCourseC.html
There are also lot of good textbooks – in order to get an overview you can start by
visiting a library or a bookshop!
However you do not need to buy a book if you just want to do a few experiments with
the robot! The major part of programming experience has to be acquired "Learning by
doing" anyway!
All relevant information can be found on the mentioned websites. The sample pro-
grams available on the RP6 CD are also quite extensive and show a lot of things. The
tutorial in this manual is also good enough for the first experiments.
An AVR specific tutorial for beginners can be found here:
for example. This website also mentiones some tools (programming equipment, etc.)
and other things, which are not required for the RP6. Nevertheless, it's worth to have
a look at it.
1
A web-search on “c tutorial” results in millions of hits! Of course there are not really that
many, but there should be quite some good ones out there...
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