Aligning the CSC385H1 lectures with the labs and project

I last taught the course with new hardware (see the Discovery Board) in the 20221 term. Unfortunately, due to the last wave of the pandemic, that offering was somewhat derailed since in-person activities were optional until after reading week. Still, the students were able to produce some very interesting projects by the end of the term. For the 2024 term, I wanted to shift away from a focus on Assembly programming and more modern approaches for how to program embedded systems. The goal was to better prepare students for the project (where assembly programming is not mandatory).

The lectures in Winter 2024 were updated to provide more insight into how the devices on the discovery board worked and communicated with each other. New concepts included power managemens and WiFi protocols that are better suited for embedded systems (like MQTT). I also introduced some active learning exercises in the lecture that focused on exploration. Specifically, I wanted students to know how to find information about a device through its data sheet and other reports. This puts less pressure on the lecture on breadth (i.e., covering every possible device the students may work with on the project), and develops skills that are transferrable to other embedded systems.