An In-depth Look at Microcontrollers (MCUs)

An In-depth Look at Microcontrollers (MCUs)

Microcontrollers, or MCUs, are transforming consumer goods, industrial automation, infrastructure and more — essentially reshaping how we interact with the world around us. With MCUs you can easily control everything from your refrigerator to your thermostat. At ICS, a quarter of the projects we work on include at least one MCU and most projects incorporate several — so we understand the potential MCUs hold. We’ve designed this webinar to introduce you to this tiny technology and show how it can be implemented using various approaches. Here are the topics we’ll address:

Overview of MCUs and their features
  • Current scope of MCU-based applications
  • Convergence of microcontrollers and microprocessors
  • Peripherals available and protocols used in today´s projects
Bare-metal vs RTOS
  • Until recently, MCU firmware also had to leverage concurrency. However, today real-time operating systems, such as FreeRTOS, can provide multitasking. We’ll compare these approaches. 
  • Possibility of running Python on microcontrollers
Challenges in firmware implementation (with example code) 
  • Application fragments implemented with the ubiquitous ESP32 MCU
  • Network-enabled demo that connects to a Mender server and retrieves over-the-air updates