Cpp

In the BEng EE program at BCIT we have two 4-week summer terms. One of them is taken right after the first year and the second one can be taken after the completion of the second or third year. I recently completed that second 4-week term, and one of the courses I took was ELEX 4699 – Electronics System Design Project. The goal was to create a robot rover that navigates an arena, and shoots targets while minimizing completion time. The arena, functioning as a server, sends data to connected client robots. Clients use a Raspberry Pi as the host controller, and a PiCam with OpenCV for image recognition.

If you have been following my posts, you would know I am an Electrical Engineering student at BCIT. In my last post, I talked about my course ELEX 4618 (Object Oriented Program Design), and some of the weekly labs I worked on. One of those labs (#8) required us to make a colored ball sorter. It had to be programmed in C++ to run on a Raspberry Pi that uses PiCam and OpenCV to detect colors and the pigpio library to enable us to use the Pi GPIO pins to interact with other hardware. In Lab #9, we added functionality so this device can be controlled and sends a video stream over the network.

During my second year of EE at BCIT, I took the course ELEX 3305 (Microcontroller Systems), where we learned to program a Texas Instruments TM4C123G microcontroller in C++. We also purchased a (TI) Education Boosterpack, which is an add-on board with various analog and digital inputs/outputs, including an analog joystick, environmental and motion sensors, RGB LED, microphone, buzzer, color LCD, and more. We programmed the microcontroller in C++ and controlled it by directly manipulating the registers. Later in the course, we also wrote assembly code to do the same. This method may be considered more challenging, but it’s essential for microcontrollers lacking a library of functions for programming.

This is my Grade 12 Computer Science project that I created in 2015, named after the original PONG game released by Atari in 1972. It is built using C++ and uses the BGI library from Borland Inc. The executable can run natively on DOS only. It is running on this website using js-dos (kudos to @caiiiycuk for their awesome project).