Course

In addition, the robotics research group in the ECE department has used the PIC24 to control trunk-like robots.

• The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Mississippi State University offers ECE 3724, an introductory undergraduate course on microprocessors. Material for the course comes from the textbook and the PIC24 support library. It is a 4-credit course comprised of 3 credits of classroom instruction supplemented by 1 credit of laboratory instruction. The first half of the lab experience consists of an assembly language based software component in which students implement 8, 16, and 32 bit signed and unsigned arithmetic, manipulate pointers, and call subroutines. In the second half of the lab, the focus shifts to the use of C to operate the various PIC24 peripherals. An integral part of the first hardware lab is construction of a simple PIC24-based system from scratch, as shown to the right. Each additional hardware lab builds on this design by adding LED/switch I/O functionality, using interrupts, communicating with an I2C serial EEPROM, performing analog to digital conversion, and controlling the speed of a fan. Lecture notes, lab experiments, and all supporting files are available on-line from the ECE 3724 home page. Several other courses at MSU make use of the PIC24:The Intro to Robotics course covers design and construction of a PIC24-based robot.
• The Embedded Systems course covers the operation of ESOS in the creation of an embedded system.