ECE 4760/5730 is the Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course at Cornell University taught by [Hunter Adams]. The list of projects for spring this year includes forty write-ups — if you haven’t got time to read the whole lot you can pick a random project between 1 and 40 with: shuf -i 1-40 -n 1 and let the cards fall where they may. Or if you’re made of time you could spend a few days watching the full playlist of 119 projects, embedded below.
We won’t pick favorites from this semester’s list of projects, but having skimmed through the forty reports we can tell you that the creativity and acumen of the students really shines through. If the name [Hunter Adams] looks familiar that might be because we’ve featured his work here on Hackaday before. Earlier this year we saw his Love Letter To Embedded Systems.
While on the subject, [Hunter] also wanted us to know that he has updated his lectures, which are here: Raspberry Pi Pico Lectures 2025. Particularly these have expanded to include a bunch of Pico W content (making Bluetooth servers, connecting to WiFi, UDP communication, etc.), and some fun lower-level stuff (the RP2040 boot sequence, how to write a bootloader), and some interesting algorithms (FFT’s, physics modeling, etc.).
It would be nice if they switch to a RISC-V cores of the RP2350 (Pico 2).
I get that RISC-V is cool and all being an open ISA but why in this specific case?
Because RISC-V was originally developed to be used to teach. One part of it was that universities with access to silicon fabs, could teach students to make custom chips without having to pay an arm architecture license fee (in the order of millions) to ARM Ltd.
Considering this is a embedded software/hardware design course and not a silicon design course, that would be entirely irrelevant.
I study Computer Engineering at Purdue and this semester, we switched over to the RP2350 for our microcontrollers class, and currently I’m taking a class on Risc-V CPU design! We also have a student organization that teaches students more of this stuff, everything from RTL to tapeout. And yes I feel quite pampered haha