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Assistance in" Roadmap to Master Embedded Electronics and Register-Level Programming"?

VishalSoni00

Hi everyone,

I’m Vishal Soni, a Bachelor of Technology student majoring in Internet of Things (IoT). I’m an electronics enthusiast with a strong foundation in PCB design, circuit debugging, and a keen interest in hardware and embedded systems.

I’ve worked on several projects—some designed independently and others built with assistance from tools like ChatGPT. While these experiences have been valuable, I want to dive deeper and gain a strong grasp of register-level programming for microcontrollers. My goal is to understand microcontroller architecture better and work at a lower level of abstraction to build efficient and scalable solutions.

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  • I started with a PIC chip many years ago, having bought a programmer, a manual, and several different chips. The manual is excellent, the programmer still works, and my first program worked after a bit of trial-and-error with the inputs to the A-D interfaces. This was not long after they first came out, they were remarkably cheap in those days!

    The programmer required RS 232 for comms, and I fitted it with a zero-insertion-force socket to plug the PIC in and out as necessary.

    The program I really wanted was to input two analogue voltages controlled by a two-axis analogue joystick, four push-buttons to four digital inputs, and that was it for the hardware. I wrote the software using a simple text editor, it occupied about two screens-full. This device replaced several CMOS up/down counters, two 'discreet' A-D CMOS converters, two pairs of quadrature decoders, and so on. The only thing that didn't work properly the first time I tried it was the joystick because I'd wired both axes back-to-front. Having sorted that out, I could fly my little Tiger Moth with the joystick, just like the real thing. I mean, whoever heard of flying a 'plane with a mouse?

    To make the same device with discreet components and a power supply would have occupied a box about the size of a shoe-box to put it all in. As it is, the PIC version is in a box about the size of a tobacco tin. It plugs into the mouse socket on the Acorn RISC-PC and works a treat. Since then I have made several other PIC-powered devices, I would have used them at work except that work decided they were too new to get any reliable reliability ratings.

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  • I started with a PIC chip many years ago, having bought a programmer, a manual, and several different chips. The manual is excellent, the programmer still works, and my first program worked after a bit of trial-and-error with the inputs to the A-D interfaces. This was not long after they first came out, they were remarkably cheap in those days!

    The programmer required RS 232 for comms, and I fitted it with a zero-insertion-force socket to plug the PIC in and out as necessary.

    The program I really wanted was to input two analogue voltages controlled by a two-axis analogue joystick, four push-buttons to four digital inputs, and that was it for the hardware. I wrote the software using a simple text editor, it occupied about two screens-full. This device replaced several CMOS up/down counters, two 'discreet' A-D CMOS converters, two pairs of quadrature decoders, and so on. The only thing that didn't work properly the first time I tried it was the joystick because I'd wired both axes back-to-front. Having sorted that out, I could fly my little Tiger Moth with the joystick, just like the real thing. I mean, whoever heard of flying a 'plane with a mouse?

    To make the same device with discreet components and a power supply would have occupied a box about the size of a shoe-box to put it all in. As it is, the PIC version is in a box about the size of a tobacco tin. It plugs into the mouse socket on the Acorn RISC-PC and works a treat. Since then I have made several other PIC-powered devices, I would have used them at work except that work decided they were too new to get any reliable reliability ratings.

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