Lab 1 Artemis

The goal of lab 1 was to setup and familiarize myself with the Sparkfun Artemis board, which will be used for the entire duration of the course and handle all robot to robot-master (me!) communication.

Prelab

First, I installed the latest version of the Arduino IDE, 2.2.1. From there, I was able to install the necessary libraries to work with the Artemis Nano, and get started on the tasks at hand.

Task 1: Blink

Following the lab instructions, I first tested the new board by running the Blink.io file.

Task 2: Serial

Next, I tested serial communication using the example file. It will be important for future debugging to be able to use serial communication to send and receive information. This was used to test the UART communication between the board and the computer. However, in order to get the messages in a readable format, I needed to change my baud rate to 115200.

Task 3: Temperature and Analog Read

The Artemis Nano has an onboard analog to digital converter (ADC) which converts voltage to a digital signal. Using the AnalogRead() function, we can recieve data from the temperature sensor. The ambient temperature of the room seemed to be roughly 32000 units. When I cupped the board in my hand, this increased to around 32500, as seen in the video below. This means that the temperature sensor successfully detected the change and the AnalogRead() function allowed the microcontroller to process the data.

Task 4: Microphone

Lastly, I tested the onboard microphone on the Artemis Nano. The microphone outputs the frequency of audio using PDM, or pulse-density-modulation. In the video, I use an online piano app to play various notes and record the change in frequency via the serial monitor. The sensor was able to clearly pickup each note!

Discussion

Ultimately, this lab helped me familiarize myself with the microcontroller we will be using to control our robot. As someone less experienced with CS, I am glad to have had this lab to experiment on a small scale with the Artemis before having to use it on the robot later on.