Design News is now featuring its strongest courses from the Continuing Education Center. The courses are free and they can be applied to IEEE continuing education credits.

Each course originally ran one hour per day, Monday through Friday. When watching the course via on-demand, you can watch the classes on your schedule – just like Squid Game. Our courses, thankfully, are plausible.

The top courses from 2021 include one that explores Raspberry Pi’s entry into the world of microcontrollers; another course that looks at the building blocks of Node-RED, and a third delves into embedded software tools and techniques.

Also, keep your eyes out for upcoming classes in 2022. The first one will be Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi Picov.

Here are some fuller descriptions of the on-demand courses:

Raspberry Pi RP2040 Bare-Metal Programming

The Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller is the Raspberry Pi Organization’s entry into the microcontroller market space. The RP2040 features dual ARM Cortex-M0+ cores and 264kB of on-chip SRAM. Unlike microcontrollers from manufacturers such as STmicro, Texas Instruments, and Microchip, which are typically programmed in C or assembler, the RP2040 was primarily designed to be programmed using MicroPython and Arduino. Programming the RP2040 using the C language is also possible. To that end, a custom RP2040 MicroPython SDK and a very highly abstracted RP2040 C SDK are available for program development.

In this lecture series, we will not write any RP2040 code using MicroPython or Arduino. We will also not depend on either of the RP2040 SDKs. Instead, we will avoid the abstraction and exercise the RP2040’s on-chip resources using only the C programming language and Segger’s Embedded Studio. Sign up here.

Developing Node-RED Dataflow Language IoT Concepts

This course will explore the building blocks of Node-RED: a dataflow programming language. Software node blocks, widgets, dashboards, and electronic circuit interfacing will allow participants to prototype user-interface controls and dashboard concepts on the bench or in the lab.  Software control blocks will be investigated using the Node-RED data flow programming language. Sign up here.

Embedded Software Development Tools and Techniques

The tools and techniques developers use to design and build their systems can make the difference between success or failure. Tools and techniques are constantly evolving and to stay relevant and beat out the competition, it’s critical to be up to date on the latest and greatest. In this course, we will explore a wide variety of development tools and techniques that will help attendees more efficiently design and build their next embedded product. Sign up here.