AN EFFICIENT MICROCONTROLLER COURSE WITH AN AFFORDABLE AND EASY TO USE DEVELOPMENT SETUP

Year 2015, Volume: 2 , 242 - 253, 01.09.2015

Mehmet Yüksekkaya , O. Erdem Haberal

Abstract

Microprocessors/Microcontrollers have been widely used in electronic
products so they have been taught to electrical, computer and mechatronic
engineering undergrads. Since medical electronics devices are also use
microprocessors/microcontrollers, biomedical engineering undergrads should have
knowledge and programming experience in microcontroller based systems. Due to
this fact microprocessors/microcontrollers have been taught as a 5 hour/14 week
lecture and laboratory course at the 5th semester in Başkent University
Biomedical Engineering Program Ankara, Turkey.

 

The main difficulties in microcontroller programing course for a
multidisciplinary program such as biomedical engineering are insufficient
allocation in the curriculum, shortage of lab space and budget constraints.
Also the complexity of the development setups and spending too much time to
understand the setup instead of experimenting it are problems for students and
instructors. Students lose their attraction while spending time to effectively
use of development tools. For this reason an efficient microcontroller course
with its laboratory and a project work is developed which puts emphasis on
learning the futures of microcontroller based system and applying many
instrumentation designs. In order to increase the efficiency of the course an
affordable, easy to use and modular development board with a free compiler for
2K program code and a free programmer software are used and important
improvements are applied.

               

Throughout the paper the details about the lectures, laboratories and
development tools and their improvements are described. The methodology for active
learning and syllabus design and determination of learning objectives are
discussed. The efficiency of the course is tested by overall grades and
responses of students. A remarkable success observed on the results.  

Keywords

Microcontroller education, instrumentation, biomedical engineering, high-level design tools

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