SPiCboard

The platform of our exercises, which is used for over 10 years as part of our exercises for Systemnahe Programmierung in C, Grundlagen der systemnahen Programmierung in C and System-Level Programming, is made up of the SPiCboard and a programmable microcontroller. The SPiCboard is equipped with different peripheral components (eight LEDs, two buttons, a potentiometer, a photo detector and a two-digit 7-segment display) and has to be soldered.

The current verion 3 of the SPiCboard is used since 2017 and can be soldered at an additional voluntary event (called Lötabend) by the participants of the lecture. For these students, all parts and the PCB are provided. After successfully soldering the board, the participants also get the microcontroller so that they can solve the programming exercises on their own hardware.

The microcontroller for the SPiCboard is the Atmel ATmega328PB Xplained Mini:

• ATmega328PB Datasheet
• ATmega328PB Xplained Mini User Guide
• ATmega328PB Xplained Mini Design Documentation

An easy access for controlling the peripherals is given by the libspicboard library.

For the exercises, the Linux-CIPs have the SPiC IDE installed, which can optionally also be used from home. In case no SPiCboard hardware is available, the simulator SPiCsim can be used.

The most common problems are listed in the FAQ.