Overall Comments

This project is much larger than it might appear. To begin with, we are dealing with a microcontroller instead of a full system. This is a totally foreign environment to many CS, and apparently CE, undergrads so the first hurdle is to understand the microcontroller, the different approaches to design and coding required, and what tools are available.

The second issue is our integration to a much larger project. We are developing software to control the Small Switch Panel component of the Revolution system. The other, and much larger, systems are the Control Unit and the Display Unit. In order to understand how our component integrates with the others we need to understand the requirements of the other components. A second version of the system does not include the Display Unit but has an expanded switch panel called the Large Switch Panel. We are not writing the code for the large switch panel but our code will be used as a basis for the later development of that component. We must always be aware of the overall system requirements and make sure we don't do anything that will restrict the later development required.

The third issue is the tools we will need to utilize. The Atmel microcontrollers can use several different cross-platform compilers and IDEs for software development. All of these were foreign to us at the onset of this project. Kevin has defined the Coding Conventions so we also need to become familiar with those. Kevin has also required we use Doxygen for our comments and eventual documentation and manuals. While Doxygen may be easy to jump in to there is still a big learning curve if we want to utilize it to the best of its capabilities.

There is a huge amount to do and every day must be used wisely.