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ECE 477

Hardware Applications of C

Bruce E. Segee

This is the current ECE477 web site. It supersedes the previous version at http://www.eece.maine.edu/~segee/classes/ece477

This course is intended to give you a good background in using the C programming language to control hardware. The hardware that we will emphasize is a PC, particularly running the free, open-source (written in C) operating system Linux, and single chip microcontrollers programmed in C.

From the guys who brought you C:

Here's a paper by Dennis Ritchie (the guy who invented C) about the history of C

While we're at it:

Brian Kernighan

Ken Thompson

A youtube video featuring Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

An Ode to C

C precedence chart

http://www.difranco.net/compsci/C_Operator_Precedence_Table.htm

Check out this site it translates c declarations into words and vice versa

http://cdecl.org/

I/O ports and security

Note that many (most?) operating systems don't like user programs mucking about with the computer hardware. This is usually a good thing. Windows 95/98 and of course DOS have no objections. Other flavors of Windows (I'm not sure about ME), don't like it.

Here's a link to software that might help you out. This one's free. This one isn't. I personally haven't tried either, your mileage may vary, no warrantee expressed or implied, void where prohibited…

This one came highly recommended from a person in class:

http://www.embeddedtronics.com/public/Electronics/minidaq/userport/UserPort.zip

The Linux helpers I wrote

ioshell.c

inp.c

outp.c