COURSE KIT
HERE'S WHAT'S INCLUDED IN THE COURSE KIT

• STM32 Nucleo Microcontroller Development Board
  
  Enter into the world of 32 bit microcontrollers with this development board from ST Microelectronics. You will learn the ins and outs of how to set up your computer to develop and debug on this board. With this understanding any ARM based microcontroller is within your reach.
  
• MakerMax Custom I2C Shield
  
  The MakerMax I2C shield has been custom designed especially for this course and will be shipped to you for absolutely free. On the I2C shield, you will learn how to program a 32bit ARM microcontroller to use its peripherals to talk to the outside world. You will become an expert in the I2C communication protocol and dealing with ARM Cortex peripherals.
  
• STM32 Discovery Microcontroller Development Board
  
  You will be using the Discovery board from STM32 to write commercial level firmware code to generate drivers for GPIO, I2C, UART, SPI from scratch!
  
  The above mentioned hardware is included with the purchase of this course and is shipped to your doorstep free of charge.

COURSE STRUCTURE
14 INTENSE WEEKS OF ADVANCED LEARNING

The course is structured into 16 intense and exciting weeks that are guaranteed to 10x your career.

Week 1 - Introduction to Microcontrollers

What are the different types of microcontrollers, architectures, explore the blocks inside the MCU and their functions. Zoom into the CPU and see how data flows inside it. Different types of memory available and how the CPU uses them.

Week 2 - Important Features of the MCU

How does the MCU boot up? What is an instruction set, an operand and opcodes. Different types of addressing modes. Digital logic levels. What interrupts are, how they work and how is using an interrupt different from polling. Reset sequence of the MCU, power on reset functionality and the importance of watchdog timers.

Week 3 - Peripherals

Deep dive into the peripherals of the microcontroller. This is a must know for every embedded engineer out there. Peripherals allow the microcontroller to interface with the outside world in various ways. You will learn about all the main peripherals.

Week 4 - Introduction to 32 bit MCU

You will enter the world of 32 bit microcontrollers which is a must know for any industrial project. Learn about ARM Cortex series of MCUs, what are the available types, and how to choose the right one. Learn about the Cortex-M instruction set and get started with the STM32 Nucleo F303RE development board.

Week 5 - Architecture of 32-bit ARM

Learn the programmers model, which is something every programmer should know to begin coding on the ARM platform. General purpose registers, process specific registers, special registers and their functions. We proceed with 2 lab sessions this week that will take you deep into the programmers model, registers and the special function registers.

Week 6 - Important Features of 32 bit ARM

You will learn about the exception model and vector table. Two lab sessions that will take you deep into the reset exception handler, vector table and vector table offset register. You will then learn about the concepts of data endianess, STM32Fx MCU block diagram overview, and bus interfaces available inside the MCU.

Week 7 - Setting up the dev environment and Peripheral driver development

We set up an open source Eclipse based development environment from scratch, including the IDE, toolchain, GCC compiler and OpenOCD debugger. This development environment can then be used for all your future projects. Use the graphical utility from ST called STCubeMX to develop drivers Hardware Abstraction Layer drivers for the STM32 F303RE Nucleo board. You will then learn through lab exercises, peripheral driver development for the GPIO, DAC and TIM peripherals!

Week 8 - Hands-on projects using the HAL library

Using the HAL library from STM32, you will work on various projects involving different peripherals of the microcontroller.

Week 9 - Deep dive into communication protocols

You will dive deep into the I2C communication protocol, understanding why it was implemented, what its used for, what its features are, how to establish I2C comms between master and slave, how to choose the right pull up resistors for your project, how do things like bus capacitance affect your I2C comms, and what are the ways to troubleshoot the common issues encountered by engineers in the industry.

Week 10 - HAL Driver implementation of I2C using the MakerMax shield

This is an intense hands on experience week. You will write the I2C read drivers to interface with the LTC2990 sensor and read supply voltage. Now, you will write the I2C write driver to configure the control register of the LTC2990 voltage, current and temperature sensor. You will end this week by successfully interfacing the STM32 microcontroller with the LTC2990 sensor as well as an OLED display.

Week 11 - Lab Exercise I2C Hands-on Challenges

In this week you will solve 4 uniquely crafted challenges of learning how to do real time temperature sensing, read analog inputs, read the processor current consumption and enabling push button inputs to your microcontroller.

Week 12 - Driver development from scratch -RCC, UART, GPIO

Start from a blank file you will develop the drivers needed for GPIO and UART communication. No other course teaches it like this and this is extremely useful knowledge for working in the embedded industry!

Week 13 - Driver development from scratch - I2C and SPI

Start from a blank file you will develop the drivers needed for I2C and SPI communication. No other course teaches it like this and this is extremely useful knowledge for working in the embedded industry!

Week 14 - Review and Final exam

We will review what you have learned through the course and there will be final exam conducted to help you revise what you have learned.