Contents

The Plan

For the first class, we meet at 8:45am in room 200, Deschutes Hall.  We may change the time based on other's schedules after the first week.  We also need to get some basic things set up and organized to begin working.  The first class will break down to roughly:

• Course Overview/Expectations
• Fill in Class List
• Discussion of Project Planning
• Demonstration of Hardware
• Establish Future Class Time
• Organizing Teams
• Disseminate Initial Hardware (possibly)

Discussion

Here we will do an overview of the course.  The course is very hands-on and will involve an evolving project so we want to set up the ground rules and get some ideas flowing up front for the product of these efforts. 

We will be handing out portions of the hardware kit this week to get people familiar with the BrainStem hardware we will be using for the course.  The hardware is to be used in teams of two people so we will establish teams this week for sharing the hardware. 

In addition, we will focus on developing a solid strategy for structured design.  This is roughly covered in this article. 

Assignment

There are two things to complete this week outside of class or at the end in our hands-on portion.  First, we need to get some survey questions answered about your background and ambitions for the course.  Second, we need you to get the hardware up and running with a simple demonstration program. 

If we don't get the hardware in your hands the first day, the hello world coding will be added to the second week's assignment. 

With your brand new hardware, you will need to go home and charge up the batteries to get started.  Once charged, you can download the software and work through a couple of getting started guides to become more familiar. 

You will demonstrate a simple "hello world" type program to the group when we meet in week 2 as your assignment. 

It will also be very helpful to get everybody on the message board for sharing questions and ideas.  To this end, a handful of survey questions have been added to a thread there which each student will need to complete.  In class, we will get a list of nicknames used in the message board to associate with each student. 

Materials

We will hopefully be providing some of the hardware at this point so you will only need a way to carry them away.  We will also be working in teams (likely of 2 persons) so you will need to trade off the hardware as we work.  The initial hardware requires a very simple soldering step which we will do to demonstrate this process for the soldering session in following weeks. 

Ideally, you will be bringing a laptop along each week.  The software works well on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux so you essentially just need a laptop with a USB port to do the interfacing.  For this first week, it is less important but it will become essential for our working sessions. 

Revision History:

• 2009-01-07: Small updates and an overall plan added

Related Links:

Main page for the University of Oregon Winter 2009 407/507 course