It’s time for a concrete todo list. I covered the general subject areas in my New Direction post but this list will put some flesh on the bones with some actual objectives. As per David Allen’s GTD (which is a great read) some of these things will go into an active project list and some will go into a someday/maybe list so I don’t spread myself too thinly.
Completed Projects:
- Learn the basics of GCC and Make. Just enough to build some basic projects, to know what more needs learning and to have a framework to hang future learning onto.
- Read the GNU Make Manual
- Complete the University of Reading Begin Robotics course.
- Write an ‘envirodump’ project to dump out platform and environment specific variables (e.g. size of built in types, include file search paths etc.) A useful tool to have in the toolbox.
- Write a unit test lib and a debug/logging lib. More useful tools.
- Learn the basics of valgrind and dbg
- MIT’s Circuits and Electronics 6.002x course
- UTAustin’s 6.02x Embedded Systems – Shape the World course
- UC Berkeley EE40LX Electronic Interfaces course
- Build a Raspberry Pi – XMBC media centre
- Build an Arduino based oscilloscope
Active projects:
- Read through K&R C 2nd ed. It’s been a while since I read this and it’s the perfect way to get refreshed. The style and content is a bit dated now but it’s short, to the point and packed with detail. The exercises make good katas (or koans or whatever else you want to call them) as well.
- Build a Lego robot platform. 2WD track driven chassis with room for motors, gearbox, battery pack, power conditioning module, processor, sensor interface breadboard and flexible sensor mounting points. Build motor driver, servo driver, HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor and reflected IR sensor interfaces and supporting software on Arduino and then on Tiva Cortex M4 board. Add CC3100 WiFi board and write remote control app.
- Find some decent resources on concurrency
- Complete the Princeton Algorithms Part 1 course
- Set up a toolchain for TI’s Tiva TM4C123 dev board in Eclipse CDT on Linux
- Read Managing Projects with GNU Make http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/
- Complete reading and projects in ‘Make: Electronics’ book
- Complete Arduino Bots and Gadgets book
- John Valvano’s Cortex M4 books
Someday/Maybe projects:
- IIT Bombay Signals and Systems course
- Explore embedded Linux installs on Raspberry Pi
- Learn Emacs and Vim
- Read The Linux Command Line