Recently, the leadershio of the REVO (Research on Electric Vehicles at Olin) club approached me and asked me to drop some secret knowledge on them.  While they have had some experience with EVs, they have no real EE background, and a very limited embedded/microcontroler background, and they wanted me to fix it.

Over the next few days I developed a 6-class course that would get their feet wet in the direction of building and understanding useful devices on an EV, or really any platform using a microcontroller, and even some that don’t (motor drivers and such).  I will be using the arduino platform for what it was intended; as a simple teaching platform.  The six classes are based around these learning goals:

1. Explain what a mcu is, what it is good for, and what kind of hardware capabilities they have as far as PWM, ADC, timers and counters.  Explain what an arduino is, and build the secret knowledge arduino.
2. Explain basic sensors that depend on resistance (thermistor, photoresistor) and current (photodiode) work.  Explain digital sensors, show an example with the 1-wire protocol.
3. Explain various control schemes: on/off, proportional, differential, and integral.  Explain how to actually use them in hardware, using examples like the laser poejector.  Focus on quadrature encoding.
4. Explain how to control big things like motors or AC current, with little things, like microcontrolers.  This will be all about BJT transistors, H-bridges, and relays.
5. Explain how to talk to other devices via serial and USB.  This will be pretty theory-heavy, but we will have a USB example.
6. Putting this all together, we will finish building a small robot and have it do some kind of task.

These six classes will be spread out over six weeks, and each will have both a lecture and a lab portion with a deliverable.  This is similar in structure to the other Secret Knowledge projects, but it differers in a few ways that will hopefully help deal with the problems of students not coming to classes, and students not retaining knowledge.

The difference here is that class is predictable.  Each week of TSK before was planned on the fly, materials were sourced from a withering stockroom, and everything had to be dirt cheap.  This made it hard to say what we would be doing from week to week.  The predictability makes it easy to know when to be where.  There is also a big carrot dangling at the end of six weeks when the students actually finish the robot; this will hopefully help eliminate the week-to-week variation of interest.

To help with the knowledge retrieval after the class is through, I will be putting together a guide ahead of time, with stuff people will learn each week.  Ideally, each deliverable will also be structured as a working example of the concepts covered in the class, and seeing everything work together will help cement the knowledge.  Most of the material will just be me throwing mud on a wall and hoping some sticks; the idea is that people will at least know where to start projects with mcus once this is all said and done.

I will be blogging more about this here as the class begins and things are done.  Classes will be recorded and posted on youtube.  In the Secret Knowledge tradition of flying-by-the-seat-of-ones-pants, and living on the gritty edge of barely being on time, right now I have a two week lead time before the class starts.  Better get going!