Abstract:

Hardware-software co-design is becoming increasingly important to the embedded systems industry. Students in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering should be introduced to this topic during their undergraduate education. Thereby, we designed the subject named Integrated Telecommunication Systems (SIT), in which we teach microcontrollers with hands-on hardware-software experiments. SIT is a fourth-year (last year) elective subject so that students have studied previously during the first and second years the Digital Systems subject where they work the fundamentals of microcontrollers through the 8051-microcontroller. Therefore, the SIT subject students have enough base to start working with the Programmable embedded System-on-Chip (PSoC) evaluation board. This board integrates configurable analog and digital peripheral functions, memory, and a single-chip microcontroller.

During the last five years, we have divided the subject into two parts. The first part is focused on designing laboratory modules, which introduce the main concepts of hardware-software co-design to the students. In the second part, students have to design, program, and develop a project based on the PSoC evaluation board to solve a problem or application raised by the professor. This last stage greatly motivates students and they can collaborate in groups to develop a solution that solves the challenge exposed. Students had to connect different sensors, actuators, and communication modules to the PSoC to achieve the desired solution; nevertheless, they clashed with the problem of errors produced by mounting the whole system in a breadboard. The poor wire modules interconnection results in the impossibility of moving the project to a certain place and the difficulty of finding out possible errors in the design.

Therefore, this contribution is focused on describing a new prototype of a PSoC robot platform that integrates several sensors, actuators, and communication interfaces. This is a low-cost solution based on a 3D-printed structure that holds the hardware elements integrated into a printed circuit board (PCB). The designed PCB has two light-dependent resistors (LDR) that allow students to work with analog signals and different interface elements such as two RGB LEDs and user switches to use input and output digital ports. Furthermore, the PCB includes serial and Bluetooth communication that makes it possible to control the robot platform and its modules through other systems such as tablets or smartphones. Regarding the external modules, the PCB can be connected to them by means of RJ11 standard connections, reducing the problems related to the wires' interconnection. The external modules included in the current robot platform design are the DC motors, ultrasonic sensor, infrared (IR) module that can be used to follow black lines, a LED matrix to show messages.

Consequently, we will describe the main features of the designed PSoC robot platform and a set of projects that students can develop to improve their ability to design, program, and debug hardware-software systems.

Keywords:

Robotics, robot platform design, integrated systems, embedded systems, microcontrollers, PSoC, university education, programming, learning-by-doing.