Goals

A weather station is an ideal example project because it involves most of the tools and techniques common to every embedded product. However, I encourage you to develop your own personal devices or products.

By the end of the 2 days, you should have a comfortable grasp of the basics. I hope you will then have the confidence to design and build your own embedded products.

We will talk about energy management for standalone battery-powered devices and low-cost, high-volume production for those who have entrepreneurial aspirations.

Tentative Schedule

We will discuss this at the beginning of the class and may make changes to suit the background and interests of the class.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

1. Introduction & Roster
2. Install Development Tools
3. Lab 1: General Purpose Output: LED (light-emitting diode).
   • write code, compile & link, program μC, test
4. Lunch Break
5. Lab 2: General Purpose Input: Push Button
   • software revision control (back up when things go wrong).
6. Lab 3: Use a timer to measure Push Button events
7. Lab 4: Read a temperature sensor

Saturday, November 1, 2014

1. Lab 5: Characterize a tipping bucket to get better results
2. Lab 6: Creating and using a look up table
3. Lab 7: Putting the system to sleep to conserve battery energy
4. Lunch Break
5. Lab 8: Using External FLASH memory
6. Lab 9: Getting Data out to the World.
7. Summary & Evaluation

Thanks to generous support from Microchip each participant in the Embedded Systems class will receive a complete development kit!

We will use this kit in several of the class labs. Plus, with this you’ll be able to continue learning and experimenting  after the class is over.