Setting up your Teensy

The Teensy 3.5 is an Arduino compatible microcontroller board powered by a 120MHz ARM Cortex M4 chip with more I/O interfaces than an AVR controller could dream of. But like most microcontroller boards, you can fry it easily if you're not careful with your wiring, so be careful. All the pins are 5V tolerant. We recommend powering it over the USB cable.

Making your Teensy breadboardable

One of the first things you might want to do is solder male headers to your Teensy to make it breadboardable. Be careful not to solder the header pins perpendicular to the two long edges on accident or else it won't be breadboardable anymore...

If you haven't soldered before, let a staff member know and we'll show you the ropes!

Installing software

For minimal headaches, please install Arduino 1.8.0 (the latest version) and Teensyduino 1.3.4, as version differences can easily cause incompatibilities. If you have an older version of either, we recommend upgrading.

Testing things out

To start out, we recommend writing basic sketches using the Arduino IDE and programming through there. The IDE should have examples for things such as reading analog inputs, controlling a servo, reading a quadrature encoder, and sending PWM signals out. This is more than enough for testing out the sensors and actuators

On Tuesday and Wednesday we'll get more into how to configure the microcontroller and peripheral electronics