While I was on sabbatical from York University I had the opportunity to teach twice at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe, Germany (Hochschule Karlsruhe, a.k.a HsKa). I had been invited to do so by Professor Klemens Gintner, a colleague and friend who I had hosted during his sabbatical in Toronto in 2015. It […]
As part of my sabbatical activities I took on the "Temps Pratiques" microcontroller laboratory sessions for electrical engineering and mechatronics students at INSA Strasbourg. In pre-sabbatical discussions with faculty and staff at INSA Strasbourg I found out that the students were learning using what I considered to be outdated technologies. The PIC16F84A microcontroller chip used […]
While on sabbatical I started getting serious about writing a book. In spite of having wanted to write a book for years, writing one while on sabbatical wasn't my primary goal. But as visa issues in France became more difficult and made more traditional research work harder the book writing became a bigger focus for […]
During my sabbatical from York University, I taught IP 411 "Embedded Systems for Engineering Applications” class at Hochschule Karlsruhe (HsKA) in April and May, 2019. This page is an update to the Fall 2018 version of the course that I also taught at HsKA. The Spring version of the course take place over six days: […]
On this page you will find the documents for the "TP" (Practical Time) lab that I instructed at the INSA Strasbourg Engineering School in Strasbourg, France while I was on sabbatical from York University. Links to videos and other material are included in the PDFs. The lab uses the Microchip Curiosity board, with built-in debugger […]
I'm getting set to teach a lab course at INSA Strasbourg in France, using PIC16 microcontrollers. My colleagues and I have made the decision to update the course from using the classic PIC16F84 to the more capable PIC16F1619. The '1619 is a bit more complex (a downside) but has debugging capability, like breakpoints (a big […]
I bought the Adafruit Metro M0 Express because it has both a debugger port soldered on and has a SAMD21 chip on it. While it has a bootloader and CircuitPython on it, I'm actually only interested in using it as a potentially student-friendly development platform for learning C / C++ on the Cortex M0+. I […]
While testing out the PIC16F88 replacement for the PIC16F84 on the INSA microcontroller teaching board I ran into issues with two things not working as per the standard sources of examples (e.g. Microchip's Developer Wiki): Interrupt Service Routines Bit setting, clearing via structures These examples appear to have been written for versions of XC8 prior […]
I'll be teaching the IP 411 "Embedded Systems for Engineering Applications” class at HS Karlsruhe in October as part of my sabbatical activities. It will take place over four days: Fri 12 October 2018, 2 pm – 5.30 pm Sat 13 October 2018, 9 am – 5.30 pm Fri 19 October 2018, 2 pm – 5.30 […]
As my deadline for producing teaching material for the PIC16 boards at INSA Strasbourg approaches, I'm running into real world debugging issues. Now, it's important to point out that I'm trying to make sure that my teaching material is debugging-focused and provides an opportunity for self-directed learning. The first attempts at running a program on […]