Increasing Student Interest Through Hardware Ownership

With the significant drop in cost of embedded microcontrollers, 3 there now exists an opportunity to give every student a trainer that they can take home to work on and can keep at the end of the semester. At Vermont Technical College, one of the courses has been modified to include a Microchip PIC16F877 based trainer board. The trainer board comes in kit form (a PCB and components) and the students assemble the board and then use it in several labs and a small project at the end of the semester. This paper details the trainer board itself and the benefits it has brought to VTC and its students.