This repository contains the assembly listings I used for teaching a one-week microcontroller workshop to high-school students in a university orientation program (Schnupperstudium Informatik) in 2015.
The goal of this workshop was to create a simplified networked traffic light system, wherein the participants each created their own implementation of the synchronization protocol.
This repository is meant as a "teachers reference", which can optionally be handed out as reference implementations after giving the students a chance to work on the problems themselves.
The examples are written for the ATmega8 and were tested on its successor, the ATmega8A. They should assemble just fine with avra or avr-as, after which you'll need to flash them with e.g. avrdude.
I've created a bootable live system image based on TinyCoreLinux containing avra, avrdude and some offline reference PDFs, but unfortunately I think there would be legal troubles to simply uploading that. However, I would highly recommend doing the same when teaching this workshop on computers that are not completely under your control (e.g. a bring-your-own-device setting).
All of the examples pull in m8def.inc, which contains the platform-specific definitions for the mega8.
This file should usually come with your assembler, in avra's case you can probably find it under
/usr/share/avra/.
On the hardware side of things, you'll need
- The actual microcontrollers (ATmega8)
- Red/green/yellow LEDs
- Some resistors for the LEDs
- AVR ICSP programmers (One per student works best)
- Some switches (DIP switch arrays work quite well)
- Breadboards
- a whole lot of those tiny wires to go on the breadboards
- a Logic Analyzer (great for illustrating how some of the examples work)