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I’m new to the world of embedded programming and I’m looking for information about interfacing with a microcontroller using I2C, USB, UART, CAN, etc. Does anybody know any good links, books, tutorials, about this subject? Since I´m a real newb on this subject I prefer if it is as basic as possible.
Since you are already a desktop developer, you can probably jump in somewhere in the middle. Download the user manual for the controller you plan to use. Get the example code from the manufacturers etc. sites for one of the simpler peripherals – UART is good.
Get a development board and an Eclipse/Crossworks/whatever development system that supports your board and get something to work – flash LED, UART echo or the like. Don’t try to use a multitasker and interrupt driver first off – just poll the UART with as few lines of code as possible. Why – because just getting a development setup to compile, link, download and run one line of code is a considerable exercise in itself, without any complications from complex code. You have your development setup and hardware to debug first before you can effectively write/debug any code for the controller. Just getting ‘blinky’ code that merely flashes an on-board LED to work is a huge step forwards:)
Most controllers have dedicated groups/blogs, either on the uC manufacturers site or linked from it – join them.
If you want to get into this efficiently, get a board and try to get it to do something – there is no better way. Once you can get a LED to flash or a UART to issue a string of chars, you’re off to the races:)
Developing simple ‘blinky’ or UART-polling functions are not wasted – you can continue to use them later on when you have more complex code. Blinking a LED, (with the delay-loop replaced by an OS sleep), is such a good indicator that the code is sorta running that I’ve always kept it in on delivered systems. The UART poll is useful too – it will run without any interrupts and so you can call it from the data/prefetch/whatever abort vectors to issue the many ‘CRITICAL ERROR – SYSTEM HALTED’ messages that you will get during ongoing development:)