Department - Author 1

Computer Engineering Department

Degree Name - Author 1

BS in Computer Engineering

Date

6-2015

Primary Advisor

John Oliver

Abstract/Summary

The goal of the current project was to determine if the PyBoard microcontroller is a suitable replacement for the Texas Instruments MSP-430 Launchpad in the Computer Engineering 329 Microcontrollers class at Cal Poly. The major projects from CPE 329 where attempted using the PyBoard in place of the MSP-430. The PyBoard was found to be a powerful and fairly capable platform for learning to develop embedded systems. Some of the benefits of the PyBoard were found to be it's ease of rapid prototyping, a fairly large collection of libraries with useful tools for microcontrollers, and many powerful abstractions that take care of tedious programming details automatically. The major downsides to the PyBoard are the opaqueness of the abstractions used and the decidedly less comprehensive documentation available for many of it's libraries. Another concern with using the PyBoard is that it does not prepare students to use the embedded industry standard C programming language.

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