Bio

Egar Almeida is an electronics technician, programmer and teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina, with a passion for knowledge and the mechanics of learning. As an educator, he works for a government agency dependent on the Ministry of Education of Argentina developing educational activities for school children related to electronics and digital fabrication. He also serves as a coordinator for the robotics course at Image Campus, a private institute in Buenos Aires, and is a mentor for children at Creactivis, a non-formal workshop where kids work on their own projects and ideas. As a contractor, he’s a developer of hardware prototypes for clients in the entertainment, pharmaceutical, consumer electronics and medical fields. Egar also worked in the video games industry for 13 years, serving as a producer, game designer and prototype programmer.

Computational Essay: Pulse Width Modulation & Arduino

Project: Wolfram Language for Electronics

Goal

The goal of this project is to create a set of lessons for self-teaching using Mathematica to interface with AVRs and the Raspberry Pi. A prototype lesson on pulse width modulation will incorporate both theoretical explanations (with interactive demonstrations) and practical demonstrations using the hardware interfaces.

Summary of Results

A prototype lesson for self-teaching has been successfully created. The lesson uses the Wolfram Language’s capabilities to aid in the theoretical explanations first, then proceeds to show interactive simulations. Finally, students can test the results in real life by connecting their devices and interacting with the objects on the notebook.

Future Work

The objective for the future is to create a comprehensive set of self-teaching lessons in electronics using the Raspberry Pi as the main platform, not limiting the output to the Pi’s GPIO but also including Arduino and direct-UART interfaces.