In college, one of my first substantial projects was creating a microprocessor system from scratch. There were overall system requirements that had to be met and general components were available to be purchased from our local IEEE organization. But other than that, the design and implementation was entirely on each student to complete. This project was extremely beneficial to my overall knowledge on how to design and implement embedded projects and I still utilize many skills I have learned from this project (especially debugging skills with a logic analyzer) constantly with all of my projects. I was able to finish this project ahead of schedule, so I decided to add a few extra features. One feature was programmable color changing LCD and LEDs. An other that really pulled the whole project together was a laser cut enclosure. Below you can see a few pictures of the project’s progression.
Microprocessor project on breadboard
Debugging project
Fully assembled project on breadboard
Custom PCB
Fully populated PCB
Final product
Final product