The Start of Something New

These winter vacations, as with any other vacation, I was looking for something new to do and increase my exposure and give me more experience. In college, a few introductory lectures had been delivered by our seniors on "Microcontrollers".

I knew an old friend (old as in the duration of our friendship, not his age ;) ) who had some exposure in the Electronics and Robotics field, and I asked him to guide me as I built a programming board for a microcontroller.

He knew about the Atmel AT89S52 microcontroller, so it was the same microcontroller I chose.

I asked him to make me a list of all the components I would need to make the board and I bought all the components from the "Mecca of Electronics" a.k.a. Lamington Road.

I already had the basic electronic stuff such as soldering iron, flux, rainbow wire and the various tools with me as I had been making electronic kits (simple stuff like clap switch and listening bug etc...) since as back as 9th grade.

Soldering all he components onto the board took about a day at max, when I realised that I was a few components short, leading to another trip to Lamington Road (This happens quite often in electronics)

Finally when I had all the components ready and soldered, I went to his house at 2pm on one fine day, so that he could do the touchups , check the circuit board and help me begin programming.

As with any electronics kit, this one also had a few problems and believe me hardware debugging is a lot more irritating than software debugging. The power was not at all reaching the 7805 transistor, so I had to desolder it and put a new one in its place.

Pray to God that you never may need to desolder a component off a board...... It is the worst thing that can happen to you in electronics......

Now, back to the board..... Even after replacing the 7805, the power did not reach it so we came to the conclusion that the track was faulty...... We shorted the track, and another track and finally the circuit began to work.

By this time it was 11pm so he quickly showed me the way to write a program and burn it on the chip (we did not have time to do it then.....). Then I said a quick bye and thank you and left for home........


The next day, I decided to try making my own program. The first challenge was getting Keil and the burning program he had referred to to make the programming wire. Finding these took 2 hours together, after which I finally sat down with a Mazidi Mazidi to try out a sample program.

Using Keil was simple enough but then burning the hex code to the chip was more of a problem than it seemed. It seemed that errors while occuring randomly while programming the chip. I finally realised that holding the board in the air while the programming took place was the most secure and error free way to burn the program onto the chip.

I wrote a simple LED blinking program to begin with, and the burning was finally successful and I actually saw the LEDs blinking in the way that I had programmed them to. It was an exhilarating feeling. It was like the first time I did something new and worthwhile in a long time.

Such moments are very rare and can never be forgotten....
I may forget which microcontroller I used but I definitely won't forget the sheer thrill and joy that rushed through me when I could make a computer program do something in real life.

These moments usually occur like the time one learns to ride a bicycle, or writes his or her name using a mouse in Paint on a computer for the first time etc......

Such moments are truly magical and will be treasured by me forever....................