EEC 10: Introduction to Digital and Analog Systems
EEC 10 is a 4-unit project-based course for sophomore students. In this class, students are briefly introduced to several of the topics that will be covered in detail in their upcoming junior and senior years. At the same time, they design a complete system as the course project that requires system-level understanding about interrelation of different fields such as analog circuits, digital systems, signal processing, etc. The course project is a music-following robot implemented using Texas Instruments Robotic System Learning Kit (TI RSLK) which locates the direction of music being played in the room and moves toward it until it reaches to the speakers playing the music. The important feature of this project is that it includes various components which cover a broad range of topics in electrical engineering curriculum and their interrelation. More specifically, students work with two (right and left) microphones as their sensors to detect audio signals, they work with analog op-amp amplifiers to amplify the sensed signals, they send the amplified signals to TI MSP432 microcontroller to convert them to digital signals and finally they process them in digital domain to control the direction of movement of the RSLK. Some of the microcontrollers topics that students are exposed to include working with general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), timers, periodic interrupts and Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM).