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Basic information, updated May 3, 2004 (Hannu Laine)

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Advanced C Programming C0018 (CAP01S3)

You have to register to the course using WinhaWille (the web interface for students to the student office)  (web address: https://www.evitech.fi/winha. The identification code of the course is C0018 and the implementation code is CAP01S3.
 

The main objectives are, that students will improve their programming skills in advanced features of C-programming language as well as that they learn system’s programming (device level programming and using operating system services in programming). The students will learn to control computer hardware and peripherals at different levels: at device interface level, at device driver level and at operating system level. Students will learn to evaluate, at which level the programming should be made in a particular case. The topics discussed and the skills learned are necessary in the development of embedded systems.

Abstraction tools, learned in the basic programming unit C0002, are still applied and deepened troughout the unit. This kind of approach is of essential importance, when large softwarte projects are concerned. The idea is that students will learn to construct entities from different data units and manipulate those entities using approriate functions. Students will learn to “pack” these entities to modules and libraries. Operating systems offer services for application programs. This course gives an introduction to these services (what kind of services they offer and how they are used in programming). Windows operating system is used as an example. All example programs are so called console programs, because graphical user interface programming is not the topic of this course.
 
 

 General information

• The course is taught during third and fourth period of the third year
• The course is 3 cu (corresponding 4.5 ECT)
• Lectures 2 h / week ( 28 hours together)
• Labs 2 h / week (28 hours together)
• One teamwork exercise (estimated effort for student 30 hours)
• Self study (estimated effort for student 30 hours)

Exam at the end of the course (3 hours)


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Main topics

The preliminary list of main topics is below.
 
• Introduction : Hierarcy levels of computer system
• Pointers
• Pointers and arrays (two dimensional arrays)
• Bit-wise operations
• Boolean vs bitlevel information
• Using abstraction at low level (bitwise-operations and memory addressing)
• Macros with parameters
• Changing interpretation of information
• Functions and function pointers
• I/O-ports and device-registers ( PIT as an example)
• Serial port, a programmer's view
• Programming serial port
• Combining C-language and assembler language
• Examples from previous topic
• Device interrupts and  interrupt service routines
• The role of  and programming PIC
• Storage classes of variables. Protecting global variables

 
• Device/File at i/o-library level
• Device/File at operating systen level
• Short introduction to Windows API
• Multitasking,  Threads, Signals, Memory management
• Process/thread synchronization
• Device control at Windows API level
• DLL-libraries
• Conclusion

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The history of topics of lectures

You can find a list of topic titles, which have been discussed so far on "theory" classes by clicking the following link.

List of topics discussed so far.

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 Course material

• You can print out the handouts from the following links
• Handouts are supplemented with notes during lectures
• Supportive books (there is no course book) 1) In the first part of the course some topics are covered in the book: Lawrence H. Miller & Alexander E. Quilici : The Joy of C

Handouts  (Handouts do not necessarily cover all topics discussed in the class.)

Part 1    (Pointers)


Part 2    (Bitlevel operations)

 Exercises

 There are about 12 task assignments during the course. Some of them are voluntary, additional tasks (marked with E, standing for extra)

Exercise 1  (It is possible to postpone doing this exercise, until the connection between pointers and arrays is examined in the class)


Exercise 2
 
Exercise 3 (Exercise 3 is to do exercise 1)


Exercise 4


Exercise 5E  ( Extra exercise, not compulsory)


Exercise 6  (Here is the program you can start with  exerc_template.c)

 Teamwork Exercise

 Exam

At the end of the course the exam will be arranged in which the understanding of the topics and the ability to apply that understanding is tested. The  final grade is based mainly on the exam. The activity in labs and in a teamwork excercise can have an effect of 20% in final grade (although all compulsory lab excercises are required to be completed to get the course approved).. The problems to be solved in the exam are similar  in nature to the problems worked out in labs, but they don't give straight answers to questions in the exam.

Here You can find some model questions and their answers by clicking links.