General discussion on bridging software and hardware

Thread Starter

greenace92

Joined Mar 19, 2015
5
I would like an explanation or brief summary on how hardware is bridged to software or more specifically for example, a program or terminal that shows the state of an IR sensor which could be as simple as 1 or 0 but how do you see that on the screen?

Joining C and a microcontroller / IR sensor

Thanks for any help
 

Reloadron

Joined Jan 15, 2015
7,501
While I am not a programmer type with any programming skills to speak of I can give you a very brief overview.

You have for example a piece of hardware, it can be a lot of things but none the less a piece of hardware. Let's say a piece of hardware used for data acquisition purposes having both analog and digital input and output channels. To communicate with that hardware we write some programming code, the code can often be written in any of several programming languages but the end result is we get a computer for example to communicate with our piece of hardware. We can use our code to create a form on the screen and a graphical user interface. The form can have text boxes, picture boxes, shapes, buttons we can click, check boxes and a long list of other components.

I can for example read a digital input channel receiving a signal from a IR sensor. That signal can be for example true or false, logic high or logic low, (1 or 0). So I could send this signal to as an example Channel #1 of my hardware and write something like this:

Code:
If AnalogIn CH1 = True Then
do something
The do something can be any number of things. Maybe make an digital output on our hardware go high or make something graphically happen on our screen, we can do any number of things with the received data.

I can also receive a data bit using a uC as you mentioned and read that data from the uC using a computer. If you want to learn about u-controllers I would suggest you buy a starter kit be it Arduino, Picaxe or other and start with basic building blocks. Learning the basics is not difficult.

Ron
 
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