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Introduction to Microcontrollers.

We often come across these tiny electronic components in our day-to-day life. These small Integrated circuits have many applications ranging from your Coffee maker to the ATM machines. This blog will be more of an introduction to the world of embedded systems.


The term Microcontroller can be understood just by understanding its two components i.e Micro which resembles small size and controller which can be anything used to control/provide instructions to other components. So an MCU(microcontroller unit) is a chip which can be used to control various other components such as sensors, relays, Led’s etc.
Imagine a scenario in which many people are traveling in a bus. There are several locations where any one person may leave the bus and the tickets for different locations are at varying prices. So the Conductor of the bus is responsible for providing the tickets to all the passengers and telling the driver when and where to stop the bus so that the person may leave. So the conductor here takes input from the passengers like destination, preferred seat etc and provides them tickets. Moreover, the conductor gives instruction to the driver also. Hence this analogy is very suitable for a typical embedded system and the conductor here is the MCU and the passengers may be different sensors, buttons, and the driver can be Actuators, LED's etc.
An embedded system is an electronic system designed for a specific purpose. The main component of such a system is the Microcontroller. A typical microcontroller can be defined as a microprocessor with some memory and many peripherals). Since the MCU must be able to control some external component there must be a dedicated hardware line for such usage. These general purpose lines are termed as General Purpose Input/Output lines or the GPIO’s.
The flexibility of an MCU lies in the fact that it can be programmed i.e we can give it instructions to perform certain operations. For example, we can program any MCU to make its GPIO line go LOW i.e to provide logic 0 as output. So these GPIO’s can be used to provide outputs to an external component such as Led. This operation of blinking Led’s is the simplest program that can be written for any MCU and is often the first program which a beginner writes and is equivalent to the “Hello, World!” in Software domain.
All the microcontrollers/processors or other digital circuitry understand only the digital language which is often termed as the Machine language. In the earlier days, the instructions were passed by physically switching between HIGH and LOW but as the systems became complex programming an MCU by using the machine language was next to impossible so the assembly language came into existence. The assembly language was more user-friendly and readable but there was still a need for another high-level language and this is when The C programming language comes into play. This is basically a high level of abstraction but at last the c code is converted into machine code so that any MCU can understand the instructions.
In the upcoming blogs, we will dig deeper into the various terms used above such as the GPIO’s and C programming. Until then you can read more about the History of computers, MCU’s and various programming languages to develop more interest in the World of Electronics!

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