MEng Mechatronic Engineering / Course details

Brief Description of the Unit:

This unit will provide an overview of the use of microcontrollers in electronic products, and the types of peripheral devices used by the microcontroller to communicate with the rest of the system.

It includes some advanced topics in C/C++ programming including data structures for embedded systems and accessing memory-mapped peripheral interfaces from C/C++ programs.

A detailed study of a number of the peripheral devices available on the STM32 family of devices is also provided, with the set of devices chosen to be representative of those commonly used in embedded systems. Below are some examples of such devices:

• Digital input/output facilities
• Analogue-to-digital converters
• Counter/timers
• Serial (asynchronous and synchronous) communications interfaces.
• Polled and interrupt-driven transfer

The module also covers some common design patterns in embedded systems including:

• State machines
• Time-driven

This course unit aims to: Provide an understanding of the operation, programming and application of modern microcontrollers and standard on-chip peripheral devices found within them.

On the successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

ILO1 - Explain how hardware elements are manipulated by high level language programs. [Developed] [Assessed]

ILO2 - Describe the operation of devices such as analogue-to-digital converters, timers, counters and serial peripheral devices. [Developed] [Assessed]

ILO3 - Describe how interrupts are generated and processed, and the benefits of interrupt-driven data transfer. [Developed] [Assessed]

ILO4 - Identify typical design patterns found in embedded software, and where they can be applied. [Developed] [Assessed]

ILO5 - Design and code solutions common to embedded systems programming problems involving I/O pins, analogue-to-digital converters, timers, serial interfaces etc. [Developed] [Assessed]

ILO6 - Formulate and test hypotheses through iterative software development. [Developed]

• Didactic lectures
• Problem based learning
• Laboratory based learning

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