In the winter semester of 2019 I helped teach a mechatronics class for senior engineering students at INSA Strasbourg. Like many of the classes at INSA, the course focused on lab work. In this case, the students were working on moderately open-ended design work for mechatronics systems, combining earlier material that they had learned such […]
During my 2018-19 sabbatical year I worked with colleagues at engineering schools in Strasbourg, France and Karlsruhe, Germany. These schools have well-developed exchange programs and wished to establish an exchange program with York University. I had many productive and insightful conversations about ideas, challenges and opportunities for exchanges with Angelika Hammann and the staff in the […]
While on sabbatical in Europe I decided to see if I still had it in me to be a student again, so I decided to take language lessons. Given Strasbourg's mixed franco-germanic history and culture I decided to take formal classes in German and French. (and picked up a few words in Alsacian along the […]
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with faculty and staff at INSA Strasbourg I found out that the students were learning using what I considered to be outdated technologies.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 recently updated my MPLAB X installation to version 5.10. The compiler hasn't changed, just the IDE. Two surprises occurred. First is that my SAMD board now crashes the IDE when I plug it in. Only on Windows 10 on my HP tablet. Works fine on my Mac. But I won't get into that today. […]
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 […]