Have you ever wondered how a few snippets of characters make a silicon chunk to blink an LED?

This course will explain the ARM M4 microcontroller start-up process and will walk though Assembly and C code to bring up the microcontroller. We will code some simple drivers to blink an LED and proceed to create a simple terminal user interface (TUI) using UART. We will also build a simple task scheduler so that multiple tasks can run in a round-robin way.

This is a self contained beginner friendly approach to introduce concepts by writing simple and complete functional code that works on a Nucleo Board. This course performs hands on coding to build, flash and debug a simple functional real time baremetal code to run on STM32F446RE Nucleo Board. A prior knowledge of C is preferable.

We will learn the following as we code through this course.

• Essentials

  • How to refer essential Reference Documents - STM32F446 Datasheet, Programming Manual and Reference Manual

  • Usage of opensource tools. A lot of documentation is available in public for these tools and can be used free of cost. Tool set-up is not covered here.

  • Elaborates ARM Microcontroller start-up process.

• Code following for minimal baremetal code

  • Linker File

  • Start-up Assembly Code

  • Makefile

  • C code sections and how to prepare microcontroller to C code compiled with GCC.

  • Flashing with OpenOCD

  • Debugging and tracing code with GDB

• Extending Code

  • Extending C code to blink LED

  • Extending C code to transmit and receive via UART for a terminal user interface.

• Context switch

  • Overview of interrupts, interrupt vector table, Registers.

  • Context switch basics and Task Control Block

  • Coding context switch and creation and and deletion of tasks.

• Software Concepts

  • Also uses finite state machine for Tasks.