Development of ATmega 328P micro-controller emulator for educational purposes

Abstract

The paper presents some of our recent results in the field of computer emulation for supporting and enhancing the educational processes. The ATmega 328P micro-controller emulator has been developed as a set of emuStudio emulation platform extension modules (plug-ins). The platform is used at the Department of Computers and Informatics as a studying and teaching support tool. Within the Assembler course, currently, the Intel 8080 architecture and language is briefly described as a preliminary preparation material for the study of Intel x86 architecture, and the Intel 8080 emuStudio emulator module is used here. The aim of this work is to explore the possibility to enrich the course by introducing a more up-to-date and relevant technology and the ATmega is the heart of Arduino – a popular hardware and software prototyping platform. We consider the options to make the process of studying the assembly language principles more attractive for students and using the ATmega AVR architecture, which is broadly deployed in embedded systems, seems to be one of them.