Practical Microcontroller Engineering with Arm Technology

Book Preface

The ARM Cortex-M4 MCU is one of the most popular and updated microcontrollers widely implemented in education, industrial, and manufacturing fields in recent years. Because of their relatively simple structure and powerful functions, the ARM Cortex-M4 MCU systems have been applied in more and more applications in our real world, including automatic controls, intelligent controls, industrial controls, and academic implementations.

The advantages of using an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller include but are not limited to the following:

• The ARM Cortex-M4 MCU is a 32-bit microcontroller, and it can work independently as a single controller to provide real-time and multifunction controls to effectively and easily control most real objectives in our world.
• The internal bus system used in Cortex-M4 MCU is 32-bit, and it is based on the so-called Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture (AMBA) standard. The AMBA standard provides efficient operations and low power cost on the hardware.
• The main bus interface between the MCU and external components is the Advanced Highperformance Bus (AHB), which provide interfaces for memory and system bus, as well as peripheral devices.
• A Nested Vectored Interrupt Controller (NVIC) is used to provide all supports and managements to the interrupt responses and processing to all components in the system.
• The Cortex-M4 MCU also provides standard and extensive debug features and helps to enable users to easily check and trace their program with breakpoints and steps.
• The TM4C123GXL EVB provides fundamental and basic peripherals and interfaces to enable users to conveniently communicate to other parallel or serial peripherals via GPIO Ports to perform specific control tasks and functions.
• The EduBASE ARM Trainer provides the most popular I/O devices, such as 4-LED, a 4-bit DIP switch, four 7-segment LEDs, a 4 × 4 keypad working as an input keyboard, a 16 × 2 LCD connected to the LCD Controller HD44780 to work as an output displaying device, two H-Bridge motor drivers, three analog input sensors, a CAN protocol and other peripheral interfaces. All of these I/O devices and interfaces provide great flexibility to enable users to design and build advanced and professional control units applied in our real world.
• The integrated development environment Keil ARM-MDK μVersion5 provides an integrated development environment to enable users to easily create, compile, build, and run professional application projects to control and coordinate the entire control system to perform a desired task in short period of time.

The author of this book tries to provide a complete package to cover all components and materials related to ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller systems, including hardware and software as well as practical application notes with real examples. All example projects in the book have been compiled, built, and tested. To help students to master the main techniques and ideas, five appendices are provided to facilitate the students to overcome some possible learning curves.

Any questions or comments regarding this book are welcome.

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