Writing Device Drivers for a Microcontroller(any)

Question

Hi All ,

I am very enthusiastic in writing device drivers for a microcontroller(like PIC, Atmel etc). Since I am a newbie in this controller-coding-area I just want to know whether writing device drivers for controller is same as we write for linux( or any other OS) ?

Also can anyone suggest some online device driver building tutorial for the same ..?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Writing a device driver for an MCU is a pretty far cry from writing it for a OS. Most MCUs won't have an OS running on them at all. You'll generally end up writing some low level Interrupt Service Routines (ISRs) and filling up buffers, that your application software will end up emptying. You don't have to fit into any device driver paradigm that an O/S has defined. You basically have to read the datasheet for the device you are wanting to interface with and read and write to its memory over whatever interface it might use (e.g. SPI, I2C, UART, etc.). Ultimately the device driver ought to provide intuitive function calls to the application software.

Answer 2

If you are thinking about developing the device drivers to interface your device with a host computer (probably using USB), then most of the microcontrollers nowadays implement default classes that rely on native drivers.

A concrete example:

If you use a PIC18F4555, you can use the regular HID (human interface device) windows driver to communicate with your microcontroller (given you implemented it correctly). No need to develop any driver.