O'Reilly has released the second edition of Designing Embedded Hardware by John Catsoulis. The new edition includes information on the latest generations of microprocessors and microcontrollers, and spells out the basics of embedded design for beginners while also providing advanced material for more experienced designers, according to O'Reilly.

(Click for larger image of book cover)

O'Reilly notes that the book steers a middle course between manuals focused on writing code for particular microprocessors and those that stress the philosophy of embedded-system design without providing much practical information.

“With embedded computers, you get to understand the machine at all levels, at once aware of currents flowing though circuit traces and software executing complex algorithms,” says author Catsoulis, who points out that it's not possible to write embedded software without understanding the hardware, nor to design hardware without understanding software. “You become involved with the machine to a degree beyond that which is possible with desktop computers. Best of all, it's a lot of fun.”

Topics covered include:

• Theory and practice of embedded systems
• Understanding schematics and datasheets
• Powering an embedded system
• Producing and debugging an embedded system
• Processors such as the PIC, Atmel AVR, and Motorola 68000 series
• Digital Signal Processing (DSP) architectures
• Protocols (SPI and 12C) used to add peripherals
• RS-232C, RS-422, infrared communication, and USB
• CAN and Ethernet networking
• Pulse Width Monitoring and motor control

Catsoulis says that he deliberately left out coverage of software in the first edition “for a variety of reasons.” The second edition does include some software: “I won't even attempt to cover the instructions of each processor in this book,” he says. “What I will do is show some simple assembly language techniques. While the instructions may be wildly different between architectures, the basic concepts are the same.”

Also new is a chapter on the Forth programming language, which, though relatively old, “is a useful tool for embedded system development to which many engineers have yet to be exposed,” Catsoulis says.

 
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