More and more people are becoming interested in hobby robotics. Unfortunately many of them have no special knowledge in computer science and particularly programming. This fact usually pushes people away from the wonderful world of robots. In this series I will try to show those who are really interested in robotics the way to miraculous world of programming. I will assume that you are a good computer user and an attentive reader. I will not explain any electronics (maybe only a little bit…) and focus on the basic principles you should be familiar with to be able to write programs for your robots. As well, I plan to cover some troubleshooting basics and the most important thing: how to look for information. I have chosen two popular platforms to show examples on. Those are Picaxe® and Arduino® and they use Basic and C programming languages respectively. There are few reasons for this duality. Firstly, if you are just starting with robotics, you are most likely to choose one of these platforms. Secondly, the diversity will help you to see the structural way of writing program rather than becoming attached to one particular language and its syntax. That means that in future you will be able to write programs in other languages with little effort spent only on learning the syntax and features of new languages. I’d like to conclude the intro with the first and probably most important statement you should remember. In fact, if you want to progress fast in programming, this should become your motto:
RTFM
Read the Fu****g Manual!
Wikipedia has a great article on this matter and I insist you read the first two paragraphs of it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM
I hope this series will be useful.
See other chapters of this series here.
