Datasheet

Chapter 1 • Your Shield-Bot’s Brain

38 • Robotics with the BOE Shield-Bot

• Using operators in if statements

• How to count and control repetitions with

for and while loops

Computer Skills

• What a baud rate is, and how to set it in your sketch and your Serial Monitor

• What ASCII characters are, and what they are used for

• Using your microcontroller’s language reference

• Why documenting code is important, and how to help make your code self-

documenting

Chapter 1 Challenges

Questions

1. What device will be the brain of your BOE Shield-Bot?

2. When the Arduino sends a character to your computer, what type of numbers are

used to send the message through the programming cable?

3. What is the difference between the

setup and loop functions?

4. What’s the difference between a variable name and a variable type?

5. What’s the difference between global and local variables?

6. What are the arithmetic operators? What does each one do?

7. What variable type will the Arduino editor apply to 21.5 if it appears in your

code? Why?

8. What three elements are included between parentheses in a

for loop?

9. What’s the difference between a block comment and a line comment?

Exercises

1. Write a piece of code that displays “the value of i = ” followed by the value of

stored in the variable

i in the Serial Monitor. Both should display on the same

line, and then move the cursor to the beginning of the next line for displaying

more messages.

2. Declare a

long variable named bigVal, and initialize it to 80 million.

3. Write an

if…else statement that takes the modulus of a variable divided by 2

and compares it to zero. If the result is zero, display “The variable is even.” If not,

display “The variable is odd.”

4. Write a

for loop that starts counting at 21 and stops at 39, and counts in steps of

5. Write a piece of code that displays the character stored by a variable stores along

with its ASCII value.

6. Write a

for loop, but instead of counting from one value to another, make it

count from 'A' to 'Z' and display the letters in the alphabet.