User manual

LPCXpresso Experiment Kit - User’s Guide

Page 12

 electronic design in general

 how to work with a breadboard

 how to solder

It is assumed that you know how to program in C. You do not have to be an experienced user but

at least know about the basics. If not, the Internet is full of ANSI-C tutorials. A good start can be

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming.

The program development environment (also called Integrated Development Environment – IDE, for

short) used is the LPCXpresso IDE, which is a Eclipse-based IDE, a GNU C-compiler, linker, libraries

and an enhanced GDB debugger. For more information see [5].

3.1 Embedded Systems Programming

Embedded systems programming is truly multi-disciplinary. An engineer must master many knowledge

areas in order to do a good job. There are at least five of these areas:

1) General programming knowledge

(C, algorithms and data structures, understanding the development environment, debugging

techniques, safe programming styles, version handling, documentation, etc.)

2) Knowledge about programming close to the hardware / Firmware programming

(interrupts, memory mapped accesses for control registers, types of memories, etc.)

3) Knowledge about the specific hardware

(details about microcontroller used incl. all peripherals, I/O, communication interfaces, etc.)

4) Application programming

(real-time operating systems, program frameworks, user interfaces, drivers, logging, field

updates, boot loader structures, factory calibration/settings, configuration management,

communication protocols, graphical programming, security, etc.)

5) Last but not least, the domain knowledge – the functional that the product under development

shall implement.

When working through the experiments in the LPCXpresso Experiment Kit you will increase your

knowledge in the first three areas.

Enjoy working with the LPCXpresso Experiment Kit!