Brads Electronic Projects Forum

What are the topics you need to know to master microcontrollers?

I posed this question on another forum.

One of the problems with learning is, "How do I learn something if I don't know what topics I need to learn?" Its like, "What don't you know and how will you figure it out?" because not everyone is going to teach you.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/201 ... ntrollers/

The more you look in to something, the more you will no doubt discover.

And it all depends on what you want to do with a microcontroller. I guess you could liken it to a sport, for example - basketball. Someone might want to learn basketball but the only thing they want to do is shoot free throws. In that case, all they need to know is that you have a ball, you stand at a certain distance from a hoop which is 9 foot high and you throw it in such a way that it goes through the hoop. But then after doing that for a while they might soon realise that they can shoot from other places around the hoop, they can bounce the ball off the ground into the hoop, they can play with other people, they can jump, they can... and the list goes on.

It's a world of discovery and once you start doing something (anything!) with a microcontroller like blinking an LED, you will start to find that you can blink it at different speeds, you can have it on for longer than it is off, you can add an extra LED, you can add a button or potentiometer to control them, you can add a photoresistor etc... Once people start doing something, they will soon discover there is a whole heap more they can add to their hobby.

brad wrote:It's a world of discovery and once you start doing something (anything!) with a microcontroller like blinking an LED, you will start to find that you can blink it at different speeds, you can have it on for longer than it is off, you can add an extra LED, you can add a button or potentiometer to control them, you can add a photoresistor etc... Once people start doing something, they will soon discover there is a whole heap more they can add to their hobby.

That is so on point Brad.. I started off with LEDs, buttons and then I spent a heap of time learning as much as I could about each function of the microcontroller, uart, adc, timers and USB etc..
Now I'm putting all these cool functions together to come up with some cool projects

Chuck posted the same thing on the AnyCPU forum too, and a few of us have had a good discussion there that you might want to read, at http://anycpu.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=317 . Chuck apparently had a few different reasons for posting, all valid. I tend to want to repeat the discussion material here, but I think it would be best to just let you all follow the link, and then I hope you will come back here and post more responses. My own first post in that topic tells how I myself got into electronics, with no teachers. I hope it will inspire someone.

I just now left a comment (awaiting moderation) on the dangerous prototypes page Chuck linked to, regarding debugging. Also relevant to the subject matter is that someone posted on a forum years ago, "and no one really ever tells you in what program do you put the code," which I answer on page 17 of my 6502 primer. This primer is the most popular part of the website, and although it's 6502-centered, there's a lot there that will transfer to other processors and microcontrollers.

I certainly agree with BigEd on the anycpu forum. Just get started with something and that will lead to all sorts of questions