Are you a young school trainee seeing for study data to learn microcontrollers?
Are you a high school / college trainee seeing for facts to create your microcontroller based project?
Are you an old man planning to change your old digital technology based create to a covenant microcontroller based design?
Are you working in an club and want to upgrade your skills for microcontroller and embedded ideas design?
You all are from range of age, expertise and skill levels. But your need is same. Your basic ask is same. Your objective is same. That's to "Learn Microcontroller based design."
You are on right track as you have decided to go along with microcontrollers for your all electronics projects. There is no other good recipe than using a microcontroller in stock design.
Here are the steps and facts for you to get started:
1. Your knowledge and ability:
Every human is unique in the knowledge he has acquired and the abilities he has.
Knowledge indicates the "experience" and quality indicate "time required to solve a create problem"
e.g. I know C language very well but I can't solve a "Array Sorting program easily."
This indicates having knowledge of C programming is not adequate but one should have good quality to "Analyze and solve the problem statement".
And this is the key and most foremost feature required while working with any microcontroller based embedded create system.
In other word this quality to solve problems is called as "Logic of creating solutions".
2. Hardware & Software
Microcontroller based embedded ideas designing is combination of hardware and software.
Microcontroller is a small Integrated Chip (Ic) and is the hardware part of the system. This small chip called microcontroller has facility to store a "Program" inside it. This is called as software.
You as a stock designer, must have both expertise. Lets understand this by one example:
"You have been assigned a simple task to create and create a stock to display room temperature"
This scheme will need following components:
1. The climatic characteristic sensor (e.g. Lm35)
2. A Microcontroller (e.g. Atmega8 Avr) to read the data from climatic characteristic sensor.
3. A 16 chars by 2 lines (16x2) Lcd display
4. Dc Voltage regulator 5V (7805 based)
Once you have this set ready, then its time to generate a circuit / schematics for this.
Here is the point where you start studying about internals of microcontroller Atmega8.
Learn the hardware aspect of this microcontroller and then the software. The software writing is using Assembly or C Language.
3. Tools and equipments
A Pc / Laptop, installed with Ide (development environment), Isp Programmer hardware, Starter kit / target board and some books or reference manuals or a Computer based Tutorial.
In above example we have excellent Atmega8 microcontroller. This is made by Atmel and is from Avr house of controllers. This is 8 bit controller.
WinAvr/ Avrstudio is used as Ide for writing program.
There are many Isp programmers (hardware) ready in the market.
Starter kit helps you to experiment and test your program by downloading (flashing) the advanced source code into the Atmega8 microcontroller.
Books, reference manuals and Computer based tutorial will help you to get started with the new and sharp world of microcontrollers.
There are any other microcontrollers ready like Pic, 8051, Arm, etc.
Every house has some unique features to offer and you have to conclude which feature you need the most.
Cost of the microcontroller is also an foremost factor in selecting. Other factors but foremost are availability of tools like compilers, Ides, starter kits, programmers, books and reference material.
Guide to studying The Microcontroller Embedded ideas