Welcome to Electromac. This blog is my attempt to organise what I have learnt about both the Mac platform and Electronics and how they can be used together to develop full blown applications and hardware.
To set the record straight, I am not an electronics engineer nor am I a computer programmer. I certainly have no qualifications in either field but I have a burning desire to learn! Officially I work in the film industry. In my day to day job, I often come across situations where it would be great to have a custom designed piece of hardware interacting with my Mac OSX laptop. A typical situation for example would be a small light weight motion control rig that could be packed up into a small suitcase and transported on a commercial carrier, setup with a small crew and operated in a remote part of the world – all running off batteries. Often I am frustrated that these devices are not yet commercially available at a reasonable price AND available for the MAC OSX platform. So I started to investigate how difficult it would be to learn a computer language that would compile and run on a Mac and could talk to some hardware device attached to my Mac through ethernet, USB or Firewire. Then further to this, I discovered that there are “others” doing the same thing, I just didn’t know it.
On the hardware front, I was shocked to find that working with micro-controllers was not that difficult – at least so it seemed. Investigating further, I tried all sorts of hardware programmers and tried to get them to work using the Terminal and command lines from the Mac. Most of these failed, mostly because of my poor Unix skills. But then, a revelation happened! I discovered an open sourced project called Arduino. It’s a project that provides a free development environment for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX! It works with a very cheap In/Out board which is either attached via USB or Bluetooth to your computer, allowing you to upload programs to run on ATMEL’s AVR Atmega8 chip. This may sound wildly geeky (and it probably is) but for simplicity – it could not be easier!
Micro-controllers have distinct advantages over traditional electronics for a couple of reasons. With a single chip, you can replace a whole raft of other electronic components and keep your design small and flexible. Generally, you only need to know about digital logic and the resulting 5 Volt circuitry (in a future post I will explain what this actually means). For me the final benefit of working with micro-controllers is the ability to “software” upgrade the design later down the track with no or minimal hardware change.
Lastly, for people wanting to learn something as complex as electronics, without the backing of a University, the Arduino project also provides another important element. A very comprehensive website, complete with many step by step tutorials laid out for people like you and me. Many of the tutorials have accompanying photographs and illustrations. Example code is well documented and explained in simple language. However, what is most impressive is the forum’s. They are moderated by Professor’s and Electronics/Software engineers who are prepared to talk to Nubies like myself and answer questions. Through this project, I took my first steps into Electronics and software design! Overcoming that fear of actually connected parts and passing electricity through them and then connecting them to my precious Mac laptop via USB, has given me the confidence to continue on and maybe in the future, venture further.
If you think it’s hard – it’s not! Yes many hours have been spent on the internet but who gets anything for free.
