The educational purpose of this project was to give us experience with microcontroller programming, interfacing a microcontroller with other hardware, assembly language / C programming, and basic networking theory (see below).

This project was an independant research project done as a pair, to emulate the project environment from Senior Design I. The goal was to create a node fully backwards-compatible with the nodes created in Senior Design I using a more advanced processor, the Motorola 68HC12, instead of the 68HC11, with all of the code rewritten in C. This processor's increased onboard RAM allowed for more code, and its interpretter allowed the code to be written in C instead of only assembly. This project would help the Senior Design I professor (also our Independant Research advisor), Doctor Greco, weigh the pros and cons of switching to the newer processor. Much of the project was dedicated to learning the new hardware of the processor, and the new programming techniques, and as we had no authoritative source for answers, we spent many hours debugging and reading manuals.

At the end of the project, we had to submit a full technical report. Feel free to browse through the appendices and code, especially the finished code for the Token Ring project.

Peter Susi and I worked as partners to develop this project.