The UC Davis C-STEM Center has developed a toolkit, called Ch Arduino, for K-14 students to learn microcontroller programming using a C/C++ interpreter Ch.
Software
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Install Ch Professional Edition or Ch Student Edition.
C/C++ interpreter Ch is available from SoftIntegration. Ch Student Edition is freely available for students. Ch provides a command line shell and an IDE called ChIDE. In the command shell, you can not only use many commands such as ls, cd, and pwd but also can use C-syntax commands such as “int a = 19;”. The ChIDE can run C code without compiling, and it has an easy-to-use debugger to help users. -
Install C-STEM Studio
The C-STEM Center developed C-STEM Studio, which integrates all software developed by the center and third-party software for STEM education. You can launch Ch and ChArduino toolkit from C-STEM Studio.
You can download all software from here.
Features
The toolkit consists of a board manager and real-time controller, a library provides all APIs for programming Arduino in Ch and firmware that running in Arduino boards.
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Manage Arduino Boards
ChDuino is a graphic based application for managing and controlling Arduino boards. The following figure shows the main window of ChDuino. You can scan connected Arduino boards through USB or Bluetooth by clicking the “Scan” button. Then you can connect, disconnect or delete a board from the list. -
Upload Firmware
Before you can control an Arduino board, a specific firmware needs to be uploaded onto the board. ChDuino provides a firmware uploader as the following figure shown. You can scan available boards in the same way introduced in the board manager. Then you can select a board from the list and click “Upload Firmware” to start the uploading process. Note that firmware uploader only allows USB devices.
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Real-time Control
Once an Arduino board is running the firmware provided by ChArduino toolkit, you can click ‘connect’ button to establish the connection between your computer and the board. Then the control panel will update the pin values automatically. Also, you can change the mode for each pin and set the pin value HIGH/LOW for OUTPUT mode and set a value from 0-255 for PWM mode.
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Program Arduino Boards in Ch
To program an Arduino board, you need to select a board from the board manager in ChDuino and then open ChIDE to start a program as the following figure shown. All libraries provided by Arduino official IDE are compatible in the toolkit. Therefore, the same code can run in either ChIDE or Arduino IDE.
The center provides a very detailed document for you to use the toolkit.
Contact Information
Have fun with Ch Arduino. If you have any questions and feedbacks, feel free to contact the UC Davis C-STEM Center with the email address support@c-stem.ucdavis.edu.