At the first glance writing software for electronics might seem like a daunting task. It may feel esoteric even to the greatest programmers with no exposure to writing software for electronics. So, if you are a beginner or an intermediate level or even an advanced level programmer you need not worry about it. Instead there is a way we can get around this and in this post i’m gonna explain the exact process.
The programming language of Choice?
Mostly it is C Language. But, some IDEs and compilers also support CPP.
So there is no new programming language that you have to learn in order to get started with programming hardware ( unless you don’t know C ).
What are the most important Operation that you need to know?
- Bit wise operators:
AND (&),OR (|),NOT (!)operators. - Bit shift operations:
LEFT SHIFT (<<)andRIGHT SHIFT (>>)operators. - Conditional Statements:
if,else,switch(which i assume most of you already have experience with). - Loops:
forandwhileloops.
Bit wise operators
Bit wise operators are not equivalent of the && you use in a if statement. They are completely different. For example, if you apply a bit wise AND operator & between two numbers, the result is computed by passing each bit of the number through an AND gate from logic gates and spitting out the number.
so, let’s say we have two numbers 5 and 9.
the Bit wise AND operation of 5 and 9 will yield 1. confused? let’s take a look at the math.
5 in binary is 0000 0101
9 in binary is 0000 1001
now a bit wise and operator passes every two bits into an AND gate. The property of and AND gate is to output 1 only when both the inputs are 1.
AND
5 0000 0101
9 0000 1001
1 0000 0001
Only the last bit of the 8 bits from both the numbers are 1. Hence, the output for the rest of the positions is 0 and the total output is 0000 0001.