Microcontroller based controller board

NOIDA, India - July 25, 2015 - PRLog -- Controller board

A controller board is a microcontroller which is built on a circuit board. It is a board providing circuitry which is important for all the control tasks like microprocessor, I/O circuits,  random access memory(ram), stored program memory (spm) and any support ICs which are necessary. The intention behind is  board helps the application developer, without application developer losing his  time and effort in developing the controller hardware. Controller boards are used for educational purpose since they are cost effective or cheap and are multipurpose in use.

They are best in microprocessor family to know more about or experiment with processor family. They were introduced in the early 1970’s and by 1976 it got popularity. It’s also common to offer  the internal bus through an expansion connector. The board which is cheap to buy  and also available easily. Expansion would be output or input  devices or the memory expanse. It’s  very unusual to add devices like  disk storage, tape or even cathode ray tube (crt) display to the connector board.

Single-chip  microcontrollers such as 8748 combines many features of previous boards into a single IC package.

Single-chip microcontroller includes both random access memory(ram) or read only memory(rom).The pins are available for input or ouput lines. These changes reduce the  area which requires on printed circuit board and simplify the design of a single board microcontroller.

Examples of single chip microcontroller include:


·        Atmel AVR
·        8748
·        PIC

For the production used as embedded systems, the on-board ROM would get mask programmed at the chip factory or on during program development it was still necessary to burn the EPROMs, this time controller IC. and so on ZIF sockets would be provided.

With the development of the affordable EPROM and flash memory it become practical to attach the controller permanently to the board and download program code to it through a serial connection to the host computer.This was termed "in-circuit programming". Controller board   carry  the support circuits for the serial interface or USB.As a convenience feature during development, many boards also carry the low-cost features like LED monitors of the I/O lines of reset switches which are mounted on the board.

Communications interfaces vary depending on age of microcontroller systems. The earlier systems might implement a serial port to provide RS-232 or the current loop. The serial port used by the application program, or it could be used with a monitor rom which helps to transfer the program into microcontroller memory. Current microcontrollers supports USB, wireless network or may also support tcp/ip protocol stack. Some of the  devices have firmware available to implement a web server allowing an application developer to rapidly build a web-enabled instrument or the system. Many of the earliest systems had no internal facility for programming at all, and relied on a  separate "host" system. this programming was typically in the assembly language, sometimes C or even PL/M and then the cross-assembled or cross-compiled on target hardware. Hosted development allows all peripherals and storage of a desktop computer to be used, which provides a more powerful environment.