2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper describes a novel microcontroller (MCU) based course that was added to the Electrical and Computer Engineering curriculum at **** university. There are several such courses available at several universities, but this was unique in that it was one of the few courses giving hands on experience to the students at our university. MCU based systems connect to the outside world via sensors and actuators. This course provided experience in using an MCU to interface with sensors and actuators in order to build intelligent systems. The interface devices were both analog and digital that are commonly used for practical applications. In addition to leveraging on their knowledge of C language acquired through prior courses, students learnt to program a microcontroller to control external sensors and actuators. Building upon the knowledge acquired in earlier courses, the students gained hardware knowledge (including PCB design) to integrate the peripherals to the MCU.
Objective: To help students use MSP 432 MCU in building real life systems.
Curriculum: This course introduced students to fundamentals of MSP 432 microcontroller (MCU) architecture (registers, memory types, signal busses, input/output ports) so that they could develop programs in C to interface with input devices like switches, keypads, and touch sensors, display with LEDs and LCDs, digital to analog and analog to digital conversion, interfacing with sensors, control motors and actuators, MCU memory types and usage, MCU timer peripherals and MCU interrupt-driven timing and I/O. The focus was on hands on experience in the lab to extend the theoretical knowledge gained from other courses, integrate hardware-software to develop projects with real life use. Every week there was a 3-hr lab and 1 hour lecture. There were two end of term projects– one involved building a smart home system and the other a slot machine.
Textbook & other materials
• TI MSP432 ARM Programming for Embedded Systems, Mohammad Ali Mazidi, first edition
• Project kit
This course was targeted at freshmen and sophomore students interested in hands on system building using microcontrollers. It was a credit lab course. Grading was based on pre-labs, labs and small projects throughout the course and two end of term projects.
Results: The students, especially those aspiring to be entrepreneurs or building MCU-based real life systems, enjoyed a hands-on course where they could build something tangible. This course was taken by students in their junior and senior years (instead of freshmen and sophomores as planned), which lead to the feeling that the course should include advanced programming concepts. Students did not show interest in building neat user interface for the end of term projects leading to poor presentation.
Conclusion and future work: In the next iteration of the course, it will be expanded to include more advanced programming concepts. There will be more grade points assigned to building user interface so that students have incentive to spend enough effort on building it.