Teaching microcontrollers in education - Flowcode 7

Microcontroller system development is becoming a much more talked about and studied area of engineering across education. Just this year for example, the BTEC National qualifications for engineering students at extended diploma level (published by Pearson) will included a mandatory unit on microcontroller systems, which must be studied across disciplines from mechanical to aerospace to computer and manufacturing engineering on top of electronics.

Microcontrollers have long since being designed into products and have been a popular study topic of choice by establishments around the globe. However, in recent years there has been an extraordinary boom. Coding is being introduced into the curriculum at lower levels of education in many countries. Raspberry-Pi has seen mini-computers put in the hands of kids from the age of 8 and Arduino has brought microcontrollers to the masses with the introduction of affordable development systems.

Flowcode provides an easy environment within which not only professional engineers, but also learners and teachers can combine mechanical and electronic understanding and develop projects for use on microcontroller centric systems. The graphical programming IDE is perfect for introducing learners to basic concepts of development without worrying them with complex languages such as C. It is also a highly intelligent environment for debugging systems and developing systems with multiple routines in a quick and orderly fashion (hence its appeal to advanced engineers).

Across previous versions, Flowcode has been hugely popular with academic institutions around the world. More than 250 lycée technique’s (colleges) and universities in France are users of the previous version (Flowcode 6) for example. Here, we take a look at how some UK institutions using Flowcode to teach key microcontroller systems to their students.

Brunel University London

Brunel University London is a world-class university based in Uxbridge, West London, and was established in 1966. The College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences offers a challenging but supportive environment where excellence and enterprise is at the heart of everything.

In 2015, the department of electronic engineering began using a range of E-blocks hardware solutions for specific telecommunications programs to be taught at the University.

Hongying Meng, Electronic Engineering Lecturer at Brunel University explained to us why using Flowcode has been of benefit.

“I used Flowcode for the students in a module called “Embedded Systems Engineering” (MSc and MEng module). Some students have never used microcontrollers before and they were able to use Flowcode easily for basic microcontroller based embedded system design on a ping pong game.

The students moved on to use Flowcode for a project on ZigBee based wireless network system for environment monitoring. The project was very successful.”

University of Leeds

At the University of Leeds, the School of Engineering have used Flowcode for the past five years and have seen some of the most recent developments that have given Flowcode its current look, feel and usability. Matthew Buckley, electronics technician explains more.

“As the senior electrical/electronic technician in the faculty of engineering, I find that using Flowcode is an invaluable tool, to clearly convey the embedded code to be used in applications with Microchips PIC series of microcontrollers.

Our students also use Matrix’ robotics solutions and Flowcode hand in hand to develop commands and designs to control the robots.”

Cambridge Regional College

Cambridge Regional College is a leading Centre of Vocational Excellence and one of the UK’s largest FE providers of programmes for overseas students with 4,000 full-time and 6,000 part-time students and 5,000 apprentices currently in training.

Long-time users of Flowcode, Cambridge Regional College use Flowcode to deliver microcontroller studies for a range of BTEC qualifications as explained by Steven Collins.

“At Cambridge Regional College we teach students from the BTEC level 2 up to the Higher National Diploma. Flowcode has become an essential part of the coursework and fits in extremely well with the syllabus. Flowcode offers our students an overview of microcontroller systems and allows problematic thinking to evolve with microelectronic designs.

Using Flowcode allows advanced designs to be constructed from start to finish. Students can work at their own skill level and adopt personal project design.

The software is unique in the educational workspace and creates an almost limitless new learning environment. There is so much creativity now available to our students that we can run a great deal of our classes using the program.

We believe the Flowcode experience is something students should all have access to for its designing and learning possibilities. The people at Matrix have created something truly amazing and Flowcode cannot be called anything other than a world class product.”

With more than 20,000 academic users of Flowcode already amounted around the globe, Flowcode 7 takes microcontroller system development to the next level with a host of new features and support for microcontroller families from 8, 16 and 32-bit PIC to AVR, Arduino and ARM.

Flowcode 7 is available now from RS Online A free version can be accessed by clicking here, whilst academic versions can be obtained from Matrix TSL. Visit www.matrixtsl.com/flowcode for more.