Designing and building an educational board for Z80 microprocessor

Abstract

Central Processing Units (CPUs) and Microcontrollers play a pivot role in modern electronics as computation components. Thus, introducing upcoming engineers to their concepts is a fundamental aspect inelectronics andcomputer engineering curricula. However, the complexity of modern CPUs and Microcontrollers makes it cumbersome for students both to understand the basic low level concepts of CPUs and to conduct experiments on. This complexity paves the way for 8-bit Microprocessors (uPs) to take place in academic institutions due to their simplicity; narrow instruction set, less pins to build circuits, small clock frequencies to visualize signals through ordinary lab equipment, and relative resemblance to modern CPUs. Many educational boards were built to tackle this issue. At the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IGEE), various boards have found their way to lab rooms, including the actual MDA-WinZ80 Integrated Development. Environment (IDE) kit. This latter is based on an all-in-one board. It connects to a minimalistic host desktop app through an outdated RS232 serial port. Through teachers experience in conducting lab experiments with those boards, many concerns has risen regarding the need for further considerations when designing solutions directed to teaching. The solution provided in this project is a Z80 IDE consisting of both a hardware device linked to a host desktop application through USB port. Our product prioritizes both student’s perspective and components’ stock availability at IGEE. The small sized board includes the minimal interfacing circuits, with the ability to customize experiments through extension boards. All Integrated circuits are mounted on dip sockets to facilitate the troubleshooting in case of board failure due to students experimentation. The board connects to a cross platform host application, written in Dart language using Flutter framework. The host app overcome the limitation existing in old products by introducing a listing fil eoutput that highlights code errors during assembling process to allow students easily spot their mistakes. The USB protocol is used instead to allow students use their own laptops.With suchfeatures, the three aspects of delivering a well structured course are met; allowing teachers to accommodate the experiments, students to effectivel yinterac twit hth eboard, and troubleshooting team to easily spot and fi xdamage dones.