Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Session 1520

EXPERIENCE OF TEACHING THE PIC MICROCONTROLLERS

Han-Way Huang, Shu-Jen Chen

Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota/ DeVry University, Tinley Park, Illinois

Abstract This paper reports our experience in teaching the Microchip 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. The 8-bit Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller has been taught extensively in our introductory microprocessor courses and used in many student design projects in the last twelve years. However, the microcontroller market place has changed considerably in the recent years. Motorola stopped new development for the 68HC11 and introduced the 8- bit 68HC908 and the 16-bit HCS12 with the hope that customers will migrate their low- end and high-end applications of the 68HC11 to these microcontrollers, respectively. On the other hand, 8-bit microcontrollers from other vendors also gain significant market share in the last few years. The Microchip 8-bit microcontrollers are among the most popular microcontrollers in use today. In addition to the SPI, USART, timer functions, and A/D converter available in the 68HC11 [6], the PIC microcontrollers from Microchip also provide peripheral functions such as CAN, I2C, and PWM. The controller-area- network (CAN) has been widely used in automotive and process control applications. The Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) has been widely used in interfacing peripheral chips to the microcontroller whereas the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) function has been used extensively in motor control. After considering the change in microcontrollers and the technology evolution, we decided to teach the Microchip 8-bit microcontrollers. 1

Several major issues need to be addressed before a new microcontroller can be taught: textbook, demo boards, and development software and hardware tools. We developed tutorials and lecture notes in which both the assembly and C languages are taught. These lecture notes and tutorials are being polished and will be published as a textbook. Three different demo boards have been designed to fit the needs of different environments. The Microchip Integrated Development Environment MPLAB IDE is being used as the major development software. MPLAB IDE, which is free from Microchip, consists of an assembler, a linker, a simulator, and several device drivers. All three demo boards use the PIC18 microcontrollers with flash program memory and need either a programmer or a resident monitor program to download the user program onto the demo board for execution. The In-Circuit-Debugger (ICD2) from Microchip is available for performing

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2004, American Society foe Engineering Education”

1

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Huang, H. (2004, June), Experience Of Teaching The Pic Microcontrollers Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13825