Project Based Engineering Instrumentation High Level Coding and Microcontrollers

As you learn Instrumentation throughout the semester, you will be tasked with creating computer programs on the Circuit Playground Express (CPX) or Arduino. The CPX itself has it’s own RAM, CPU, HDD and many sensors while the Arduino is a simple microcontroller with no sensors, or harddrive. The CPX though is kind of like a mini computer! You can plug the CPX into your computer via USB and access the hard drive (HDD) from your own computer. When you program on the CPX you need to write programs on the CPX itself so that the mini computer can run the program you wrote. The CPX knows how to read multiple different languages but in this class the main languate will be the Python language which has been ported to the CPX and called CircuitPython [51][30]. Since many programs will be written in CircuitPython it is import to first learn how to program some things in Python. Python can be easily downloaded by itself but it’s nice to get what’s called an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This way programs can be written on the computer for practice and better debugging. This chapter is all about getting Python and an IDE downloaded on the computer and learning how to use it. Extra sections have been written to briefly discuss Octave, Google Sheets and Google Colab as well. You can use any of those platforms to complete the assignment.