Microcontroller Basics Course (1)

This course is for everyone who always wanted to how microcontrollers work and how to use them, but was always afraid to ask. It is intended to explain the fundamentals, starting from scratch. The Elektor Electronics 89S8252 Flash Microcontroller Board (presented in last month’s issue) is used as the hardware platform.Nowadays, we all take working with computers for granted, and not only that, we often work with quite powerful equipment. The heart of a computer is its processor, such as a Pentium III. Relatively speaking, a microcontroller is both much less and much more than the processor of a typical PC. It is less because it processes smaller programs, uses less memory and is usually much slower. However, it is also more because it already has many elements on a single chip that are spread out over the complete motherboard of a PC, namely working memory, timers, interfaces and port connections.