sufst / c-workshop

C Workshop

This workshop is designed to help you learn C. The aim is to make it as advanced or simple as you want.

Rules

These are to try and get you used to writing C for embedded devices.

• No using int. Use fixed-width types, e.g. uint16_t.
• No using malloc

Tasks

1. In the src folder, make a file called workshop.c. Make this file print Hello World! to the command line.
2. Edit the main method to read a string from the command line and then print it. This can either be passed as a command line argument or taken as input within the function.
3. Create a header file with a struct for a person. This should have fields for name and age.
4. In your main method, use user input to populate an instance of your struct.
5. Make a function that takes a pointer to a struct and prints each field to the command line
6. Using the GPIO library (gpio.h), create a GPIO pin then continuously take a user value and write it to the pin.
7. Create another GPIO pin and run your function which prints a struct to print the GPIO pin struct whenever the value of the pin is above 128.
8. If you get this far, look at multithreading (pthreads) and synchronisation in C. Run two functions at once, one which adds structs to an array (a queue), then one which reads from the counter and prints the struct to the terminal. (Hint: this is a producer-consumer synchronisation problem.)

Compiling

This project uses CMake to generate the build file. This is a common way to make building software easier.

1. Make a folder called build and change to it
2. Run cmake ..
3. Run make -s

Once you've run make (or any other build tool), you should have an executable in the build folder that you can run.

You will need a C compiler installed (probably either gcc or clang; I'd recommend gcc). This should be easy on Linux or Mac. On Windows, please use WSL otherwise it will be a pain.

The commands will probably be something like this.

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make -s
$ ./workshop