Embedded Systems in Egypt: Microcontroller and Success : A true Story

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Microcontroller and Success : A true Story

At the year of 2008 , I found an advertisement in Appliance magazine about a free kit from a Microcontroller company called Renesas.

I really wanted to get this development kit. It was dedicated to motor control. I registered for this kit but unfortunately it was available only in USA and Canada.

However, my email was added in the company's clients database. Next, the company started a design contest at the same year called Renesas HTS Design Contest 2008.

The company invited me to participate in this design contest. It was a world wide contest which included shipment of free development kit to each eligible participant.

First I was admired by the idea itself of receiving a free development kit for the contest. I wanted to have this kit to learn more about Embedded C programming and to learn the Renesas technology which was new to me until that time.

To be eligible to receive the kit, there was a short demo for the company's other educational boards over a Virtual Lab environment. Then you are asked few questions to qualify for receiving the kit.

I passed through the stages of qualification and waited to receive the kit. When I received it I started to develop my design right away.

The company made a very good idea for improving the challenge through the launch of a forum for the challenge.

Each participant posted the idea of his entry and provided some technical details about it . This idea was very helpful and motivational. Any visitor or another participant can see your posted details and get admired with it or comment on it.

My design was a Multichannel Oscilloscope. The idea was very simple. I made the analog signals read by the analog-to-digital converter of the Microcontroller M16C ( on which the board is based )

The M16C has many A/D inputs but and there were 3 of them available in the challenge board.
The signals values were converted into digital in the Microcontroller and they were sent to a PC based client software which incorporated the display of a virtual Multichannel Oscilloscope.

Virtual Oscilloscope

This is the Renesas HEW program window

From the PC based client, the user can choose the input channel to be displayed on the virtual oscilloscope and the rate at which it is displayed.

Program Control Panel

Before the last day of the deadline of the contest I submitted the source code for the Microcontroller side (written in Embedded C ) and the source code of the PC client (written in Visual Basic.Net) .

The results of the contest were announced on Renesas DevCon 2008.

I've got the 4th honorable mention prize for my entry "Multichannel Oscilloscope".

This contest was very challenging and rewarding. Thanks to Renesas who has helped me through all this contest.

Location for the HTS 2008 projects:

http://renesasrulz.com/design_contest_archives/renesas_2008_hew_target_server_design_contest/m/mediagallery/276.aspx

Here is the location for my project:

http://www.renesasrulz.com/docs/DOC-1290

رابط المقالة باللغة العربية

The link to the post in Arabic

http://arabic-embedded-egypt.blogspot.com.eg/2010/04/renesas.html

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