Micro Code

Michael's blog about teaching, hardware, software and the things inbetween

PCBs for next winter term

August 05, 2017 — Michael Engel

These new PCBs, designed in-house, will be used in my courses in the upcoming winter term.

Our boards feature an LPC1778 Cortex-M3 microcontroller as well as a plethora of typical embedded interfaces, such as RS232, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, I2C and, of course, plain old GPIO ports.

The boards will be used in my courses "Microcomputer Technology", a third-semester course mandatory for all bachelor students in electrical engineering and computer science, as well as "Embedded Operating Systems" for fifth- and seventh-semester students. Here, the students are expected to develop their own small preemptive multitasking OS in the accompanying lab sessions.

The microcontroller sits on a separate board, which allows to exchange the chip. We are currently working on a Cortex-M4 (LPC4330) module, which will be used for teaching digital signal processing next summer, as well as an FPGA board, which will allow to replace the microcontroller with a soft core, e.g. a Cortex M0 or M3 from arm's DesignStart program.

We have ordered the boards from EasyEDA, which has again proven to be a reliable manufacturer with excellent quality, low prices and superbly fast turnaround times -- one week from order to delivery!

Naked boards

Naked boards

Even more boards

Tags: pcb, arm, Cortex-M3, NXP, LPC1778