Do you actually perceive what is occurring throughout the mysterious black packaging of a microcontroller or microprocessor? Most individuals don’t — we simply learn to use them. That’s as a result of they’re wildly complicated circuits combining many various subsystems which might be all abstracted away from the view of the person. To assist college students higher perceive these built-in circuits (ICs), Dr. Panayotis Papazoglou designed the {Hardware}-Oriented Microprocessor Simulator (HOMS). 

Dr. Papazoglou is an affiliate professor on the Nationwide and Kapodistrian College of Athens (NKUA), so he has a stake in creating an academic device like this one. The purpose of HOMS is to supply a visible and tactile demonstration of what occurs inside an eight-bit microprocessor. For instance, it is going to present a price shifting from a counter to a reminiscence register. That’s one thing that’s troublesome to visualise when utilizing a microprocessor, even for those who’re working near “the steel” in meeting. 

HOMS is a modular system, so college students can experiment with blocks that characterize completely different subsystem circuits inside a microprocessor. Every module has an Arduino UNO Rev3 board to manage its personal capabilities, with all the modules working below the coordination of a central Arduino Mega 2560 controller. One module could, as an illustration, characterize reminiscence and can present the information “written” to it on a show. One other module could have buttons and switches to permit person enter.

There are software program simulation instruments that search as an example computing fundamentals in an identical approach, however many individuals study higher by bodily interplay. For these individuals, HOMS may very well be very useful.