Course Information

Instructors

Dr. Ray Bucklin and Dr. Sencer Yeralan (e-mail)
Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department
Rogers Hall
Box 110570
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
Department phone: 352.392.1864

General Description

This is not the syllabus. Please read the new syllabus. (The syllabus on the UF page may not be up to date.) We will discuss how to design high-performance embedded microcontroller based control systems with emphasis on integrating hardware, software, and applications interfacing. Hands-on experiments will illustrate and reinforce the basic principles. The experiments have an agricultural engineering orientation, but they are applicable to other engineering fields.

New This Semester

In order to keep up with the technological developments in the electronics industry, this semester we introduce substantial changes to the course.

First, we will use a 32-bit microcontroller. Until now, the course used 8-bit or 16-bit microcontrollers with rather limited resources.

Second, we will use open-source development tools.

The drop in processor and memory prices, along with continued miniaturization, has the effect of making "embedded PC"s a viable alternative to low-cost microcontroller-based industrial controllers. Using a 32-bit processor with several megabytes of memory allows the use of a standard operating system such as embedded Linux. This, in turn, fundamentally changes the concerns of the systems designer.

We also have a few experts of the field who will come to class and tell us about their activities and accomplishments in embedded control.

Questions?

This is a flexible graduate course, which is also open to undergraduates. Please contact me (Dr. Yeralan) if you have specific requirements, questions, comments, or suggestions.