Development and application of the ChArduino toolkit for teaching how to program Arduino boards through the C/C plus plus interpreter Ch

摘要

The growing popularity of microcontroller-based prototyping boards in many engineering and science applications has greatly increased the demand of mechatronic skills in the technical job market. The need to keep up with this new tend, combined with the proven effectiveness of integrating theoretical learning with hands-on, project-based activities has driven the development of new educational standards and curricula pivoting on the use of microcontroller-based prototyping boards. However, the most common Integrated Development Environments (IDE) used to simplify program development lack the intuitiveness and post-processing capabilities needed in an instructional environment. This paper presents an approach aimed at overcoming these obstacles. It provides a unique and comprehensive framework for programming Arduino boards through the C/C++ interpreter Ch. It extends the authors' previous work on the topic by integrating a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a library of functions, and by improving the serial communication protocol. The paper also shows how the toolkit can be easily integrated with other features and toolkits available in Ch such as plotting and line-by-line debugging to create comprehensive projects tailored for K-14 students at different levels. The concepts presented in this work are applied to programming Arduino boards but provide a general basis upon which similar frameworks can be implemented for other boards or in other programming languages.