Embedded Design In A Sophomore Course

Abstract

Recently in academia, a push has emerged to include engineering design early in a student's course sequence. The desired result is to captivate the student's interest in engineering before the student has had a chance to change majors. Otherwise, the student would not experience the design process until the capstone courses in the senior year. In this paper, an embedded design project in a sophomore course is presented. The design project is based on the USB Toolstick from Silicon Laboratories. The USB Toolstick is an 8051 series microcontroller that is self contained, economical, and very student friendly. What follows is a discussion of the sophomore course, an overview of the USB Toolstick, and examples of embedded design based on the Toolstick.

8051 Embedded Design during Trying Times

“…Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, students in this course would propose to the instructor an embedded project based on the Intel 8051 family of microcontrollers programmed in assembly. Examples of projects are an "automated beverage server" and a "mini basket ball game controller" [3]. The automated beverage server consisted of toy remote car with a platform holding the beverages.…”