DEVELOPMENT OF A MICROCONTROLLER LABORATORY FACILITY FOR DIRECTING STUDENTS TOWARDS APPLICATION ORIENTED PROJECTS

This paper discusses the development of a laboratory facility for a microcontroller course so that students from this course can play an active role towards application oriented interdisciplinary projects. These project groups are composed of students from three courses covering Electronics Engineering Technology (EET) and Manufacturing Engineering Technology (MET) programs of the Technology Department of Northern Illinois University (NIU). One of these courses was Tech 430: Microcontroller Interfacing and Applications. For these student projects, microcontroller has served as the system controller and the students from this course contributed towards these project with a knowledge of microcontroller in terms of hardware system design and programming.