How To Learn Embedded Systems At Home | 5 Concepts Explained

Today I'm going to show you how easy and cheap it can be to start learning embedded systems at home. All you need is a development board, like the MSP430.
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0:00 Introduction
0:16 5 Essential Concepts
0:33 What are Embedded Systems?
1:57 1. GPIO - General-Purpose Input/Output
3:14 2. Interrupts
4:18 3. Timers
6:37 4. ADC - Analog to Digital Converters
7:44 5. Serial Interfaces - UART, SPI, I2C
9:46 Why not Arduino at first?
10:11 Outro & Documentation

This video is part of my Embedded Systems Explained series.

Today I'm going to show you how easy and cheap it can be to start learning embedded systems at home. All you need is a development board, some wires and a computer.

First of all, what is an embedded system? It's everything you'd expect a computer to have, a processing unit, memory, I/O, just integrated in a mechanical or electrical system. Because they usually doesn't need as much processing power as a computer, embedded systems have much more limited resources, thus encouraging a developers to use resources wisely.

Before starting, it's important to choose a family of microcontrollers to start learning. Even though a lot of them have development boards available (MSP430, Microchip PIC microcontroller, Atmel ATMega) I know it can be hard at first to make such a choice, so I'm going to recommend you the platform I learned at first and the one I still use daily. Because of the large selection of microcontrollers that it offers, the good documentation, code examples for each peripheral and large community, I recommend you pick a Texas Instruments MSP430 board.

The 5 Concepts explained in this video are:
1)GPIO

These are just like I/O ports on your computer, but much simpler. They can either output one of two values or read the value at the port (as a logical value). We output a value to these ports or read values from these ports through registers. These are memory locations allocated to a specific peripheral and are meant to configure and interact with the peripheral.

2)Interrupts

Interrupts come in handy when trying to run a piece of code after something happens. In contrast to polling, where we wait inside a loop for an event to happen (such as a flag being set), we activate a hardware interrupt and write an interrupt handler -- here we put the code that we want to run when the event happens.

3)Timers

Basic timers count up, up & down, continuously and can be used for timeouts, counting how long a process takes, creating a real time clock and many more. Count up means counting up until reaching a programmed limit, then starting again from 0. Count up & down counts up until the programmed limit, but then counts down until reaching 0. Continuous means the timer counts until it overflows and then starts again from 0.

Usually, timers have capture and compare modules. The capture mode allows us to time other processes - The compare mode allows us to output signals with a modifiable duty cycle.

4)ADC - Analog to digital converter

ADCs or analog to digital converters allow us to convert a voltage into a number we can work with in software.

We'd use this to measure the voltage of a battery, such as the system's own battery or to read certain sensors.

The opposite of an ADC is a DAC or digital to analog converter, which outputs a certain voltage depending on the code we supply to the DAC.

5)Serial interfaces

Serial interfaces allow us to communicate with other integrated circuits or even to a PC. The most basic serial interface usually available is UART, which stands for Universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter and requires just 2 data wires - TX and RX. It signals the start of a communication through a start bit, followed by 8 bits of data, optionally a parity bit for basic error checking and a stop bit.

In contrast, SPI and I2C allow multiple devices to be connected to the same bus and allow for faster speeds.

Why should you NOT choose Arduino at first when learning Embedded Systems? Because it has many layers of Software over the Hardware and you won't interact with the hardware at the low level.