An Introduction to Hardware Interfacing and Device Driver Development

Workshop Overview

This workshop introduces the fundamental principles of interfacing with hardware in an embedded system, including an overview of device drivers. It discusses plenty of essential practical techniques along with traps for the unwary and how to avoid them. The aim of the session is to de-mystify what can be considered a black art for those who have little or no experience of hardware interfacing. It includes demonstrations on an embedded target system.


Objectives:
- to understand how software interfaces with typical embedded system hardware
- to understand the purpose, structure and typical components of a device driver

Delegates will learn:
- the principles of how hardware devices interact with software
- practical techniques for accessing hardware and handling interrupts from a C program
- what a device driver does and what it typically consists of
- the methods typically used to develop device drivers

Who should attend:
- experienced C programmers new to embedded software development
- software engineers with little or no previous exposure to hardware interfacing

Pre-requisites:
- sound knowledge of C or C++ programming language

Duration:
- 3 hours, including refreshments

Course Materials:
- workbook

Agenda:
Hardware Basics
- what can software see?
- address mapping and decoding
- hardware documentation

Accessing Hardware from C
- techniques for memory-mapped access
- register manipulation
- shared memory
- traps and pitfalls

Interrupt Handling
- what are interrupts? when and why are they used?
- interrupt processing
- interrupt handling in C
- traps and pitfalls

Device Drivers
- purpose of device drivers
- device driver structure and components
- typical development process

Presented by :

"Specialists in building and improving foundation embedded software."