Course Project

Oregon Institute of Technology, Portland West Campus
EET 364 Microcontroller Systems Winter 2011

Objective: The student will build a complete application using the 68HCS12 and additional components.

You are on your own for this assignment! The only requirements for your project are:

  1. It perform something useful
  2. It has at least one input device
  3. It has at least one output device
  4. It uses interrupts beyond just the flashing heartbeat.
  5. At least one input or output device must be hardware that is not on the Dragon12-Plus board, which you have interfaced to the 68HCS12. A device other than a computer connected to the RS232 port qualifies, as does a second 68HCS12 connected via any interface.

Two or three students can have a group project. In this case there must be at least four devices not on the Dragon12-Plus board interfaced to the 68HCS12. One of the devices can be a second Dragon12-Plus board.

Devices on the Dragon12-Plus board that might be useful include the push buttons, keypad, row of LEDs, 4 digit 7 segment display, 16x2 character LCD display, DACs, speaker, IR source and detector, temperature sensor, light sensor, RGB LED, motor controller, and the potentiometer. You can use any of the interfaces on the Dragon12-plus board including RS232, RS485 (basically a differential pair version of RS232), IIC, SPI, ADC, PWM, ... or even those we haven't studied in detail like the CAN bus.

You can see what students did the past six years here (online).

I do have some suggestions.

  1. Maintain a notebook. It is a useful record of what you did during the project so you know what worked and what didn't work. You will also find the notebook useful when you write your project report.
  2. Gather together all external components early in the term, ideally once you have decided on your project. Some parts may be difficult or impossible to obtain quickly.
  3. Don't try to do everything at once. Write small test programs to check out your external devices and to check operation of internal devices you might be using in different ways than in earlier lab assignments.
  4. Keep your program modular to keep it manageable. Use interrupts extensively so that each interfaced device is independent, communicating with the 68HCS12 via its own interrupt routine. Use subroutines when you feel it would simplify your code either organizationally or by eliminating redundancy.
  5. Once everything is working, you will need to convert to a standalone application, with the program in EEPROM and D-Bug12 not used. See the note on stand-alone applications here.

Remember that the instructor is available for guidance with any aspect of your project.

Some students have taken their projects and used them as starting points for their Senior Project. This is a good way to try out Senior Project ideas. Naturally, the project here should not be as complex as a Senior Project!