The purpose of this lab is to provide real time debugging using a liquid crystal display. For this lab, you're going to need the LaunchPad and the liquid crystal display. In this particular portion of the lab, you will interface the LCD to the microcontroller and write a set of both low level and high level driver functions to make the LCD work.

Here's the LaunchPad, and there's the LCD. And so hardware wise, you're going to interface these eight wires up to the synchronous serial port of the MSP432. And once we tell it to go over here, it will start. And so this LCD has two functions. You can see the graphical function here where I can plot images and move those images around.

Mostly through this class, you're going to use the character, numerical, and letter output for debugging. Let me show you something really awesome you can do with the liquid crystal display. The goal of debugging is to be able to observe internal parameters of the robot. Here's a lab 17 solution, which drives down the center of the road. But what you can see on the LCD is distance to the wall in real time as the robot's going. So being able to see parameters is an important part of debugging.

In this lab, you learned about the synchronous serial port, busy weight, I/O software synchronization, and a decimal to ASCII conversion. The essence of debugging involves two aspects, control, which is what your system is doing, and observability is what your system is thinking. And an LCD on your robot doesn't make it go faster, but it gives you a convenient way to observe what your robot is thinking. Have fun.