ECE 4760/5730, Cornell University

Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers - V. Hunter Adams

Design of real-time digital systems using microprocessor-based embedded controllers. Students working in groups of 2-3 design, debug, and construct several systems that illustrate and employ the techniques of digital system design acquired in previous courses. The content focuses on laboratory work. The lectures are used primarily for the introduction of examples, description of specific modules to be designed, and instruction in the hardware and high-level design tools to be employed.

This is a Cumulative Design Experience (CDE) course. As such, lab exercises in this course will draw upon and synthesize as much material from the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering curriculum as possible. Students will implement concepts from differential equations, physics, a variety of coding classes, digital signal processing, analog circuits, control theory, computer graphics, robotics/mechatronics, and more in real, physical projects.

The course is taught by Hunter Adams, who is a staff member in Electrical and Computer Engineering. The course is currently taught using the RP2040 microcontroller on the Raspberry Pi Pico development board.

Please note that this is the new course webpage. If you are looking for the previous one, click here.

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Lecture recordings

• YouTube playlist linked here and embedded below.
  
  

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Assignments

Lab exercises, reading, and final project

• Lab 1: Synthesizing birdsong
• Lab 2: Animating murmurations of starlings
• Lab 3: PID control of a 1D helicopter
• Final project: a 4-week, open-ended design project

Metainformation and due dates

• Schedule of due dates
• What makes a good laboratory exercise?
• Lecture slides

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Student final project demonstrations

• YouTube playlist linked here and embedded below.
• Student webpages available here

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Links (these are our "textbook")

Daily-use links

• Course demo code
• RP2040 datasheet
• RP2040 C SDK Hardware APIs
• RP2040 C SDK Guide
• Pi Pico datasheet

Course infrastructure

• Setting up C/C++ build environment for RP2040 on Windows
• Setting up C/C++ build environment for RP2040 on Mac
• Understanding RP2040 C SDK architecture
• Using RP2040 C SDK (dissecting a simple example)
• Protothreads on RP2040 (from Bruce)
• Building demo code in the computer lab
• Course bill of materials

Algorithms and techniques

• Direct Digital Synthesis
• Fixed point arithmetic
• Interfacing with a keypad
• Fast Fourier Transforms
• Synchronization of integrate-and-fire oscillators
• Synthesizing birdsong
• Boids, plus distributed consensus
• Boids, plus predator
• Synthesizing cricket chirps
• Complementary filters
• Digital lowpass filters
• PID control (phenomenological intro)
• PID control (analytical intro)
• Particle filters, sigma-point filters, EKF's, UKF's, KF's
• Worked estimation examples
• Mechanical construction of inverted pendulum
• Lattice Boltzmann algorithm
• Tuning reaction wheel PID
• Electrically isolating DC motors
• Picasso, by way of Fourier

Communication protocols

• SPI communication
• I2C communication
• UART communication

Lab exercises from previous semesters

• Synthesizing and synchronizing snowy tree cricket chirps
• Animating leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move
• PID control of an inverted pendulum with a reaction wheel

Applications and projects

Hunter (RP2040)

• CAN driver implemented with PIO on RP2040
• UDP ethernet transmitter implemented with PIO on RP2040
• Stepper motor driver for RP2040
• VGA driver for RP2040 (+Mandelbrot, Barnsley, Game of Life)
• Audio FFT to VGA on RP2040
• Resistive touchscreen to VGA display
• Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) via timer interrupt
• Dual-core Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) via timer interrupts
• Simple DMA example
• PWM-based AM transmitter

Bruce (RP2040)

• DMA computing machine
• Lattice-Boltzmann on RP2040
• Micropython experimentation on RP2040
• Fixed point experimentation on RP2040
• 16-color VGA and Joystick on RP2040
• MBED for RP2040 (+steppers, NTSC video, DLA, FFT, Specra)
• Random number generation
• 8-bit VGA
• UDP networking with Pico W
• NTP to RTC
• Web server access point
• Interfacing with external memory

Hunter (PIC32)

• Enigma machine emulated on PIC32
• Realtime audio spectrogram
• Birdsong synthesizer

Bruce (PIC32)

• Digital Signal Processing
• Sound synthesis
• Neural modeling
• Random number generation
• Pixel strip displays
• DMA weird machine
• NTSC video generation

Raspberry Pi technical documentation

• Getting started with Raspberry Pi Pico
• Hardware design with RP2040

Student-generated documentation

• RP2040 randomness and ring oscillator (Deemo Chen)

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Course information

Teaching staff

• Instructor: Hunter Adams (Cornell page, personal website)
• Retired instructor: Bruce Land (website)
• Teaching Assistants

  • Sarah Ellenbogen (sje57)
  • Alex Scotte (ajs667)
  • Nikhil Satheesh Pillai (ns594)
  • Mahmoud Elsharawy (mse63)

• Course dog: Pickles

Lecture and lab schedule

• Lectures (Gates G01): MWF, 12:20-13:10
• Laboratory sections (Phillips 238): MWRF, 13:25-17:25 ; R 8:00-11:00
• Extra lab hours (Phillips 238): TRF: 18:30 - 21:30
• Office hours: You may come to any lab section and I'll be there. If you'd like to meet individually, please send me an email.

Lecture recordings

• RP2040 lectures: This playlist will be updated with each new lecture.
• PIC32 lectures (a few years ago): A different microcontroller, but many similar concepts

Course policy, grading, and lab report expectations

• Policy page: This is the implicit contract to which you are agreeing by taking this course. Please read it.

Previous course webpage (PIC32)

• Link here: Contains information that you may find useful and interesting!

Canvas site

• Link here: Will be used to turn in all assignments

In the news!

• Cornell University’s Digital Systems Design course is taught on RP2040 (Raspberry Pi)
• Cornell updates their MCU course for the RP2040 (Hackaday)

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Life after ECE 4760/5730

Publish your project!

• ECE 4920: In this technical writing seminar, we will turn your final report into a magazine article and submit it for publication.
• Projects published last year
• Projects published since 2002

Take ECE 5760

• Course webpage: A similar course based on system-on-a-chip and FPGA design

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