Teaching materials
Everything you need to run each week
A lecture outline for every week of the 10-week quarter, the students' lab handouts, a grading rubric, a TA guide with pre-lab checks, and a printable pin-out and safety sheet for each station. Pick your section's board with the platform switch: board-specific parts follow it.
Lecture outlines
Each outline has the week's learning goals, the slide sequence for its two lectures, a board demo to do live, and two check questions with answers. The weeks follow the quarter schedule.
| Week | Topic | Lab handout |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What an embedded system is, and a first boot | Lab 1 |
| 2 | What a board is made of, and first power-on | Lab 2 |
| 3 | The boot ROM and the SRAM stage | Lab 3 |
| 4 | Memory bring-up and software in DRAM | Lab 4 |
| 5 | UEFI, and Linux from first line to login | Lab 5 |
| 6 | Device tree, pin multiplexing and GPIO | Lab 6 |
| 7 | I2C, SPI and the logic analyser | Lab 7 |
| 8 | UART, and drivers in user space and the kernel | Lab 8 |
| 9 | Putting it together, and recovery | Lab 9 |
| 10 | Project presentations, and where embedded Linux goes next | Lab 10 |
For grading and the bench
Grading rubric
What full, partial and no credit mean in each lab, and for the project's checkpoint and demo.
Open the rubricTA guide
What to check on a spare station before each lab, and the common failures and their fixes.
Open the TA guideStation sheet
One printable page per station: console pins, the 3.3 V rule, power and the boot controls.
Open the sheetLab handouts
The students' own page for each lab: steps, what to measure and what to hand in.
See the labsIn preparation
- An annotated boot log for each platform, explaining every line from power-on to the login prompt. Until it is published, students annotate their own captured log from the modules.
- Power-up oscilloscope traces for each platform, for lab 2. Until they are published, capture one power-up per platform on a scope before the term (lab setup says how) and copy it to every bench.
- Handouts for the semester's extra labs: the shell and desktop-flashing lab, building U-Boot from source, the GPIO lab with interrupts, PWM and a microcontroller comparison, and the separate UART and driver labs. Until then, the quarter's handouts for the same topics are the starting point.
- Quizzes: instructors write their own for now, from the two check questions in each week's outline.
Write to us to hear when it is ready.