Using PC and Microcontroller to Implement Lab kits for Educational Purpose

Abstract

Undergraduate education usually characterized by a large number of students compared with graduate education. In laboratories, we mostly suffer from a limited number of lab boards compared to the students’ number. Also, we need to help the students to improve their skills in electrical engineering; therefore it is important to implement lab boards using a personal computer (PC) and a microcontroller to help encourage the students, making them interested enough in building their own private practical projects. In this work implementation of a lab board using a microcontroller and reusable electronic equipment have been done, also a pulse generation and random data sequence for digital circuit and control application are done by using PC serial port (RS232) with Matlab software (m-file). Two kinds of stepper motors (polar and bipolar) driver circuits have been presented in this work using discrete components. The pulses to the stepper motors are applied by Arduino board (Atmega 2560). The software which is used is Atmel studio-7 and the program has been written in assembly language. Trying to produce an efficient lab board using assembly method of electronics parts is necessary nowadays to reduce the importation for similar tools that are used for educational purposes in Iraqi universities.