Microcontrollers and YOU!

Recently I've had the wonderful opportunity to TA ESE 123 at Stony Brook University with Professor David Westerfeld. Over the past semester I've been working in the student lab, helping with their assignments and lab tasks. For the second half of the class however, the students were to build a digital clock combined with a USB charger. The project took advantage of AVR mirocontrollers for the digital clock part of the design. Being a freshman level class, it would be a daunting task to teach not only basic electric theory, but combine that with basic microcontroller theory combined with learning assembly. I decided it would be best to write a handout that went over all the basics of computation theory, microcontrollers as well as completely outline the hardware and software aspects of the digital clock. The resulting document is about 30 pages of insight, knowledge and experience all dedicated to the project this semester of ESE 123. The audience of this document is the beginner and expert alike, I hope that anyone who reads it learns something new.

Attached to this post is the full handout, it introduces a new line of hardware for this blog, the AVR series of microcontrollers. The specific chip used in the project was the ATtiny48 microcontroller. I am also attaching the full commented code.

Get the full writeup here: Write Up
Grab the code here: Code

*Note, the code was written by Professor Westerfeld and cannot be used without his consent.