Merge Two Arduino IDE Sketches - Crazy_Blink - Part 1

DaveE · 2024-05-10T13:39:13Z

Crazy_Blink A Grim Fairy Tale Marriage of Two Arduino IDE Sketches Part 1 – Introduction, Outline and Hardware Introduction This is intended to be a beginner’s introduction into how to merge two merge two Arduino IDE sketches to form a single programme. There are many example sketches available from multiple sources, including the Arduino IDE built-in examples and provided by third-parties, including the Drone-Bot Workshop and GitHub. A common requirement is to merge two or such examples into a single programme, but this aspect of embedded programming seems to have been largely overlooked. Of course, many people have a professional programming background, including extensive experience in C and C++, who will regard this aspect as straightforward, but it can be more daunting for those coming from other backgrounds. A comprehensive tutorial on the subject could probably fill a dedicated course, and require the learner to do numerous exercises, so this will only be an introduction, which aims to provide a simple framework and some explanations of what to look for. Equally, some sketch combinations will be much simpler than this example. So please treat this an introduction to some of the possibilities to consider, analogous to introducing a box of new tools. For a specific job, some of the tools might stay in the box, just choose the ones you need for the occasion. Nevertheless, it is presented as a tutorial, encouraging the reader to perform the typing and editing to get more familiar with the process, rather than just copying and pasting entire scripts. Screen captures of some of the resulting edits are provided for checking purposes. It assumes the reader has worked with a few example Arduino sketches, and understood the basics of the programme in each case, but may not have noticed some of the more ‘subtle’ aspects of the Arduino IDE, which have been cleverly arranged to minimise the complexity of embedded programming. The example has deliberately chosen to make a very simple, but sadly uninteresting and contrived programme, in the hope that the reader can concentrate on some of the issues concerned with merging two scripts. Thus the reader is respectfully asked to treat this topic as a ‘Grim Fairy Tale’ and disregard any (patently obvious) thoughts that this project is too simple to require such a complex process. ---------- Although a ‘one size fits all’ recipe is impossible, it is hoped that the reader will then be able to apply a similar approach to far more novel and useful projects. However, compiling this guide is in itself an experiment, and I invite suggestions as to how it can be improved, comments on which parts are successful or not, and so on. It has deliberately been kept to a very simple hardware requirement and only uses C language constructs. I appreciate that C++ ‘extensions’, when compared to C, offers more tools for the toolbox. Others may point to other languages, particularly Python, offering advantages, albeit using other IDEs. ----------- For convenience, this topic has been divided into multiple parts; readers encouraged to regard the end of each part as time to take a break, and then review that part, before proceeding to the next part. Outline of the Project Plan It is common to start with a general concept of what a project (or programme) should achieve. It is a good idea to document that concept at this point, before thinking about how to achieve it. While simple projects may present an obvious programme structure that can be coded immediately, in many cases it is better to break the task into two or more mini-projects, each of which produces a contribution to the full project, followed by integrating these contributions into the completed project. For example, consider an embedded microcontroller project, with a microswitch, acting as a position sensor, and an LED (light emitting diode) acting as an indicator, with a programme executing on the microcontroller, that uses the signal from the sensor to control the LED on and off. NB For an example of suitable code for such a microswitch project, use the Arduino IDE to find the example sketch Button, by following the path starting from File in the title bar menus: File → Examples → Built-In Examples → 02.Digital → Button ------------------------- While this task is simple enough to find or create in a single short programme, now consider the case when the microswitch is replaced by a sophisticated sensor for remote sensing, and the LED is replaced by a motorised actuator, and both the sensor and actuator need many complex interactions with the microcontroller. It soon becomes apparent that it maybe more convenient to split the programming task into three (or more) parts, e.g.: Fetch data from position sensor Send commands to motorised actuator Combine 1 and 2, so that the incoming position data, automatically commands the motorised actuator Now, if we are ‘lucky’, we may find example sketches that assist with the first two tasks. ...

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Ron

(@zander)

Father of a miniature Wookie

Joined: 6 years ago

Posts: 8047

2024-06-04 11:52 pm

@billinfl I meant the merge, is that what you understood?

First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's & MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
My personal scorecard is now 1 PC hardware fix (circa 1982), 1 open source fix (at age 82), and 2 zero day bugs in a major OS.

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