Microcontrollers programming

elective monographs

This course will focus on microcontroller programming. Standard programming techniques, software tools and typical microcontroller architectures (for instance ARM) will be presented and illustrated by practical examples on real hardware. Through the course students will broaden their knowledge about low-level programimming skills and gain ability to build and program simple microcontroller systems based on ARM design kits. C will be used as primary programming language with short assembler inlines.

Lecture will be held 2 hours every week and laboratory exercises - 4 hours every second week.

1. Areas of application of microcontrollers, architecture of ARM microprocessors

2. Binary structure of executable code, programming environment, compiler, debugger

3. Binary inputs and outputs on the example of button and LED

4. Microcontroller clock and clock signal distribution, simple UART serial interface

5. Interrupt system, interrupt handling, external interrupt

6. Counters, use of a counter to generate interrupts and periodic waveforms, PWM, RGB LED

7. Infrared transmitter and receiver

8. Analog-to-digital converter, analog thermometer

9. I2C serial interface, accelerometer or other sensors, e.g. temperature, pressure, humidity or lighting

10. SPI serial interface, LCD

11. Multiplexed keyboard 4 ✕ 4

12. Real Time Clock (RTC)

13. Serial interface RS232, Bluetooth communication module

14. DMA

15. Floating-point coprocessor, digital signal processing (DSP)

16. Flash memory programming, bootloader

17. Overview of other architectures

Websites with documentation of chips used in classes

Knowledge

1. Student has an in-depth knowledge of the architecture of the microprocessor.

2. Student knows the working principles of peripherals: keyboard, LCD display, serial interfaces.

Skills

1. Student understands low-level principles of program implementation, with particular emphasis on interrupts.

Student should perform small exercises on a regular basis during laboratory classes and should implement a larger programming project. For the very good mark student should pass a minimum of two small exercises, the larger project should use at least two interrupts and DMA (if that makes sense), and the source text should be elegant and well commented. For the good mark student should pass at least one small exercise, the larger project should use interrupts, and the source text should be elegant.