8-bit MCUs continue to be a popular microcontroller for embedded systems because they are fairly simple to understand and write code for. I have been pursuing embedded programming as a hobby for several years now and have found the obstacles to understanding to be pretty difficult to overcome. In the course of the past year or so, though, I haver begun taking steps to figure things out. My first step was to actually purchase a microcontroller development board along with some books. I ended up purchasing a dev board from Silicon Laboratories. The actual development kit I bought is the C8051F020DK. It provides everything you need to get started with Microcontroller development. What it doesn’t include though is a quick way for programmers to learn electronics. This continues to be my biggest challenge. Here, however, is what I’ve learned so far for those of you who are Windows programmers but would like to venture into the embedded world.
Interrupts Are Like Events
As programmers we are used to responding to events constantly. An event handler on a button or a list control that has just been changed gets triggered when a user does some function such as clicking the button or changing the selection in a list.
Things are similar in embedded programming. While embedded systems don’t have the layer upon layer of abstraction we’re used to, they do provide the tools you need to be able to do what is necessary in the embedded world. Interrupts are a special abstraction that get triggered based on a timeout or a button (a physical button on the dev board for example). Timers are a special peripheral of these chips that will count up and then trigger an interrupt when the number overflows. When that happens, we are able to figure out how much time actually elapsed and create more meaningful delays in order to achieve what we want.
While flashing an LED (Light Emitting Diode) is not terribly exciting, it is something that can be handled very easily in an embedded system using interrupts. You simply set the timer running and attach an interrupt function (similar to a callback, really) and when the timer overflows, our function gets called. It is at that point when the LED gets toggled on or off to make it flash.
Ports Turn Stuff On and Off
On the development board, I have 64 port pins that I can manage in code that turn things on and off. The C code to do so is very simple. First, we have to define the memory location of the pin we’re interested in. Bascially on my system there are 8 ports with 8 pins each. Only the lower numbered ports 0-3 are bit addressable which means that they can be turned on and off independently of the rest of the pins on the given port. Byte addressable only ports require that you maintain state and use bit shifting and/or masking to make the changes that you need.
Hooking It Up
I’ve hooked up my board to an “Electronics Learning Lab” from Radio Shack. You really don’t need to get one of those, but I had one and decided to use it. My first project was connecting it to a 7-segment display on the learning lab. For each of the LEDs in the 7 segment display, I connected a port pin from port 1. Below are the pinouts for the peripheral connections. I used Port 1, which is connected to pins C4, B4, A4, C3, B3, A3, C2, and B2. See the frame below for the complete pinout.
You can see the way the seven segment display is connected in the following illustration.
From Vast Resources to Few
Being a Windows programmer makes learning embedded systems a bit of a challenge. By specification, the 8051 only allows you a maximum of 64KB of program code. If your program is bigger than that, you are either out of luck or you have to use some embedded guru’s black magic that I am, clearly, not yet familiar with. This is a far cry from the amount of programming (and data for that matter) memory space we have at our disposal as Windows programmers.
As strange as it may seem, I really like the challenges that come with learning embedded systems. I think it makes you more likely to consider optimization in other types of programming which can be a good thing. As soon as I think of a killer project to create, I will prototype it, market it and sell the idea to highest bidder. Until then, I will just continue to fiddle around with LEDs and, well, LEDs. Does anybody have some ideas for a killer widget that is primarily LED related?