MSP430 microcontrollers essentials - A new approach for the embedded systems courses: Part 3 - Data acquisition and communications

This paper presents the third part a new approach for embedded systems courses appropriate for both high school and undergraduate classrooms, that has been conceived and designed to accomplish these goals, while motivating and equipping this next generation of engineers to rise to future challenges. Part 1 of this paper presented the outline of the course, its structure, and the initial subjects covering an introductory overview in logic design and embedded processors and a description of the available software and hardware development tools for the MSP430. Part 2 described the MSP430 Architecture, Device Systems and Operating Modes, General purpose Input/Output and all the peripherals integrated in the MSP430 family devices. This 3^rd part describes the MSP430 data acquisition and communication peripherals integrated in its family devices. It also presents the advanced laboratories that gather all the knowledge acquired during the course. The course structure was defined in order to be easy to understand and provide a logical flow along the topics, as it mostly progresses from simple topics to more advanced ones. The developed materials include slides for class room teaching, explanatory documents for student and educators future reference, laboratories, tests, programs and application examples after each chapter. Each module is dedicated to a specific aspect of the MSP430 device, including the description of a range of peripherals.