Digital Electronics: Robotics, learn by building module II

Course details

This course is in pre-release. Lessons will total over 30 in number, released over the month of November.

With over 1,600 students enrolled in Module I, this module is the second of five on how to build robots. In this module 2 course, you will build digital electronic circuits, use and program microcontrollers like the PIC and Arduino, and connect to the real world with them. You'll need a good understanding of basic electronics (i.e., you've complete module I), some basic math skills, a computer, and that's it! No prior knowledge of digital electronics or programming is required, and yet by the end of this course you'll have built functioning digital electronic circuits like a digital memory, and programmed microcontrollers which are basically a computer on a microchip. You will connect these to the real world for home automation and of course, controlling your robots. All courses have captions for the hearing impaired.

Course materials:

You will need the analog electronic parts and a breadboard, which you can purchase as an accompanying kit (i.e., the Analog Electronics Kit from module I) or provide your own.

You will also need the digital electronics kit which again you can purchase as an accompanying kit or provide your own parts. The first lesson is a walk-through of what is in the kit and acts as a parts list for this module.

This course is the prerequisite for Module III which is physics and robotic drives and prototyping skills. In Module IV, you'll culminate all you've learned as you build a 3D printer from scratch, hook it up to a desktop computer and make your own plastic parts. The 3D printer is, in effect, a robot which you can then use to make parts for your other robot designs.  Module V takes your robot to the next level with autonomy. Navigation and external sensing, receiving and using GPS signals, inertial guidance for areas where you can't get GPS, artificial intelligence, and more.

Lesson overview:

In this course we'll be covering:

What is digital?

Binary & Hexadecimal system and ASCII
Analog to digital and digital to analog conversion
Logic gates and you'll make your own RAM
Digital Addressing/demultiplexing

Microprocessors & microcontrollers - what are they?

Programming & using PIC microcontrollers to:

-display information on an LCD display

-Read both digital and analog inputs

-PWM control a DC motor and servo motor

-Read keypad matrixes

-control LED displays

-writing to flash memory on board for remote systems

What is Arduino?
-using Arduino for all of the PIC projects above, as well as using full-colour TFT touch screens

Building our mobile robot

Giving our mobile robot a "brain"
Ultrasonics and ultrasonic radar / external sensing
Programmable IR remote

and more!