Instructions Circuit Diagram
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8.0. Programming the Robot Arm
Now we are gradually coming to the programming of the robot.
Setting up the source text editor
First of all, we need to set up a little development environment. The so-called
“source text” (also called “sourcecode”) for our C program must be fed into our
computer one way or the other!
To this end, we will denitely not use programs like OpenOfce or Word! As
this might not be obvious for everybody, we stress it here explicitly. They are
ideally suited to write manuals like this one, but they are totally inappropriate
for programming purposes. Source text is pure text without any formatting.
The compiler is not interested in font size and colour...
For a human being, it is of course much clearer if some keywords or kinds of
text are automatically highlighted by colours. These functions and some more
are contained in Programmers Notepad 2 (abbeviated hereafter by “PN2”) that
is the source text editor that we will use (ATTENTION: Under Linux you need
to use another editor that offers about the same functions as PN2. Usually,
several editors are pre-installed! (e.g. kate, gedit, exmacs or similiar)). In ad-
dition to the highlighting of keywords and others (called “syntax highlighting”) it
offers also a rudimentary project management. This allows to organise several
source text les in projects and to display in a list all les related to a project.
Moreover you can easily retrieve programs like the AVR-GCC in PN2 and get
the programs conveniently compiled via a menu item. Normally the AVR-GCC
is a pure command line program without graphic interface...
You will nd more recent versions of Programmers Notepad on the
project homepage: http://www.pnotepad.org/
The newest versions of WINAVR don’t require the setting up of menu
items anymore!
PLEASE NOTE:
In this section we don’t describe anymore how you have to set up menu
items in PN2 as the newest WINAVR versions have done this already for
you!