Hi Ben,
Awesome! Looks great. Here are some minor notes:
Under "Tools and Materials", you say you need an mbed and a cable. This is obviously true but it'd be nice if it was clear we do include a cable with mbed! Small thing, but i've noticed on some sites selling mbed that they have "recommended items" quoting USB cables etc, and I really don't want people thinking we're not including a cable; that is like christmas when you open something cool and it says "batteries not included" - doh! Needs AAAs and all your remotes take AAs!
Some of the images are heavily compressed, and therefore you can't read the code, so i'd tweak the size/quality trade-off; perhaps ensuring the src is gif/png before converting to PDF is a good approach?
As Mark says, Fig 9 should include the whole main.cpp code. We're really trying with mbed to make things simple/concise enough so you really can always post a complete example rather than snippits; it is obvious to you what is missing, but to a new starter it is a level of subtlety that can be confusing.
Perhaps think about variable naming in code, and check for consistency. Classic bug here is the comment refers to "bit_val", whilst the code uses "bin_val". Maybe I wouldn't capitalise Bits as well, just so it makes it easy to distinguish between class names and class instances - perhaps it is "leds".
Binary, mapping of variables to bits, how that maps to leds, overflow etc can be quite subtle for a newbie. I think there is an opportunity at the start of the "writing a binary counter" section to throw in a figure and a concise explanation about what you are trying to implement and how. Even a listing of the sequence you are trying to get:
00000000
00000001
00000010
:
00001110
00001111
00000000
might help. Certainly don't want to go overkill on theory and must keep it concise, but I think you need to offer a way of unknitting all these concepts from an introductory sentence should someone need to understand/be reminded of binary/hex/overflow/adding; by example is fine.
I'd consider up front in the tutorial briefly saying we're going to get you from x (e.g. unboxing) to y (e.g. writing a first binary counter example). That way someone reading has an expectation of the level/depth of the tutorial. In particular, if they have worked the basics with mbed they wont be disappointed when it stops, and will know part 2 is for them and come back when it is ready.
I'll let others comment on what else might be interesting from a first time users point of view, but in general it feels very nice.
Simon
horta stephane.
6
replies
Hello everyone,
Let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Ben, and I'm a senior at Purdue University studying electrical engineering. My friend George and I are working on the creation of nbitwonder.com, a site that aims to provide tutorials and projects aimed at high-end microcontrollers. We have created a tutorial for the mbed, and we would be interested to hear the community's feedback on said tutorial.
We have posted the first tutorial at http://nbitwonder.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mbed_Introduction.pdf.
In short, what do you like about it? What could be better? Is the format alright? We're looking for any and all feedback.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Ben