You can view the detailed plan of our workshop here
After our last workshop on “Introduction to Microcontrollers, Sensors and Arduino“, we wanted to go further by taking a workshop on embedded systems. In March 2018, we (Srijal and myself) in collaboration with Electronics Students Association and IR cell of our college we conducted another hands-on workshop on introduction to embedded systems design.
The aim was to demonstrate the complete end to end process of designing and building an embedded system from scratch; right from hardware design, board assembly, board configuration and then writing the respective embedded C code to get the experiments to life without using any Arduino libraries.
For this purpose, I designed a custom board using the ATmega328p microcontroller. The board had an onboard LCD display, 3.3V & 5V regulators, ISP as well as serial programming interfaces.
The ATmega board documentation can be viewed here.
The example codes for both embedded C and Arduino can be found here.
We started the workshop with concepts of PCB designing and manufacturing. We went through the design process and the design considerations for the board.
On the second day, the participants completed the assembly of their boards by soldering through hole and SMD components. Along the way, we showed them tips and tricks of soldering. After testing all the boards, we had LED and LCD interfacing experiments. We ended the day with an example of ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) interfacing using a potentiometer.