EE152 -- Real-time embedded systems

EE152
Real-time embedded systems

Professor and TA contact info and class meeting policy

Instructor: Joel Grodstein, joel.grodstein@tufts.edu, https://www.eecs.tufts.edu/~joelg. Directions to my office are here,
Class time/place: TBD
Office hours: TBD
TBD
For emergencies or private matters, please e-mail or see me directly.

Calendar, syllabus and final projects

The class calendar is here.
The syllabus is here.
If we decide to do final projects, you may choose any final project that you're interested in. Some potential choices are here.

The individual labs

Not a lab #0: Day 1 course intro
Lab 1: blinky disco on bare metal
- slides on keyboards, monitors, memory and GPIO
- prelab video: prelab Zhu GPIO video
- lab handout
- lab files: lab1_main.c. lib_GPIO.c skeleton for this lab.
Lab 2: blinky disco with FreeRTOS
- slides on operating systems; and classroom demo blinky_pi_main.c
- prelab is chapter 3 of the FreeRTOS book
- lab handout: Blinky disco with FreeRTOS
- lab files: lab2_main.c
Lab 3: UARTs
- same slide set as for lab #2
- lab handout
- lab files: lab3_main_v1.c, lab3_main_v2.c, lab3_main_v3.c, and lib_UART_lab3.c
Lab 4: driving a DAC at low speed via ticks and HAL
- slides on DAC, DMA, timers and interrupts
- lab handout
- lab files: lab4_main.c
Lab 5: driving a DAC via high-speed DMA
- same slide set as for lab #4
- lab handout
- lab files: lab5_main.c
Lab 6: collecting your ECG
- Slides on cardiac electrophysiology
- lab handout
- lab files: lab6_main.c and ecg_normal_board_calm1_redone.c_data
Lab 7: processing your ECG with the PTC algorithm
- slides about PTC
- lab handout
- lab files: lab7_main.c, ecg_normal_board_calm1.txt, host_lab7_main.c, host_lab7_plot.py

Labs general info

First, the all-important legal and safety overviews
Turn in your lab reports on the web at this link. It will ask you for you Halligan username and password; these are just your usual Halligan ones that you use for the Windows PC lab (not your Tufts UTLN).
Here's an overview of how to hook up the electrodes to your body to read your ECG. It unfortunately shows you the hookup for lead III (left leg to left arm) and for surface EMG, neither of which we use. 3M has published a nice website with more info, which also shows standard locations for an ECG (we won't quite use those locations, though).
If you've not used an oscilloscope before, here's a reasonable tutorial from a different class (most of it is also applicable to us).
Here are videos #1 (7:49) and #2 (15:32) on PlatformIO debugging.

Common files for the labs

Some common files that you'll need in multiple labs: lib_ee152.h, lib_clock.c, lib_GPIO.c (available after lab 1), lib_ADC.c, lib_DAC.c, lib_UART.c
A clean project-setup environment for the VSCode/FreeRTOS labs (i.e., everything except for lab #1). Download it to Windows and unzip it, and you'll get an entire directory tree.

Resources for FreeRTOS and STM32

Resources for learning about CSRs

The EE14 textbook is "Embedded Systems with ARM Cortex-M Microcontrollers in Assembly Language and C", by Yifeng Zhu. Some chapters are listed here, mostly in order of how useful they are to this course.

Chapter 14 describes GPIOs, which are the main way we talk through pins
Chapter 21 describes D-to-A conversion.
Chapter 20 describes A-to-D conversion; with a Zhu ADC video;
Chapter 22 describes serial communication, which is how UARTs work (as well as SPI and I2C, two common protocols)
Chapter 11 describes interrupts, which is how the 1ms tick for FreeRTOS is implemented and a Zhu video on interrupts
Chapter 15 describes timers