Beginner-level Embedded Systems Projects?
A student of mine came to me this morning and asked for some ideas for an embedded systems (ideally hardware+software design) project to be completed in the next 6 months or so. He's a freshman, and inexperienced, but has the motivation to learn if pointed in the right direction. The purpose of completing this project, besides getting his feet wet in Electrical/Computer Engineering and Computer Science, is to make his resume more attractive in terms of snagging an internship in Summer '09.
My question is:
What are some good general resources to understand simple hardware, a microcontroller, and the basics of what firmware/software is, given little to no experience in any of the above? My own background is somewhat unhelpful here, as I learned a lot through both formal training (which he's interested in, but wants to get started now) and through the internship I got my freshman year through nepotism ;-) (which he wants to do, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem)
What are some interesting project ideas of the appropriate scope?
Some initial ideas:
- A Jeopardy-style game that would light up an LED, and the player who pressed his/her button first is the winner, and perhaps the microcontroller could keep score on a couple 7-segment displays.
- A tone generator (user sets DIP switches (or more ambitiously, presses keys on a PS2 keyboard) to set a frequency), and the microcontroller uses a D/A converter to output a sinusoid of that frequency
- Some kind of small sensor (maybe a temperature sensor for his dorm room that served up the results as an RSS feed). The web-based aspect of this project would be made significantly easier with a RabbitCore from Rabbit Semiconductor.
All the suggestions as to microcontroller kits are great! I would really appreciate additional project ideas (i.e. "The student should design X) as well. Thanks!
Answer
I've heard, and read a bunch of good things about the Arduino and PicAxe platforms. Arduino seems to have the biggest community behind it, and the upstart cost is fairly minimal (~20-30USD for the kit).
LadyAda from adafruit industries sells a tutorial kit which comes with an Arduino board and 8 tutorials which teach basic electronics, and microcontroller programming.