Ternary numbers for diagonal micromouse turns
by Alan Dibley
The translation of a route from one using 90 degree turns only to one using a combination of 45, 90 and 135 degree turns is not an obvious or trivial task. There are several possible approaches. this method recognises that there are only three kinds of action in an orthogonal route. Thus it seems to make sense to represent those values as a base three, or ternary, number. A simple translation process can then take these values as triplets and look up a translated move in a table.
AVRMacPack works well enough in Xcode but I don’t understand Xcode so I wen looking for an alternative. While trawling through back issues of SERVO magazine, I came across a pair of articles by Dennis Clarke about setting up Eclipse with AVRMacPack and the avr-eclipse plugin. One of my recurring mistakes is the feeling that you can’t have enough development tools so I gave it a go…
The AVRmacpack for AVR development on the Apple Mac contains command line tools. These are all well and good if you want to do things the traditional way with text editors, terminal windows and make files. No real problem. However, if you want the benefits of a modern IDE with things like function lists and refactoring, you might want to try Xcode. It is, after all, supplied with your Mac.
As a first step, the blinking of an LED is an essential part of development for a new processor and environment. I had read somewhere that the bootloader on an arduino was compatible with an avrisp/STK500 programmer. That turns out to be quite right! 
After many hours playing with the new iMac, it is time to get something ‘proper’ done with it. By proper, I mean, of course, some microcontroller development. To start with, I have been looking at the AVR.
