Microcontroller based application prototyping using domain specific modeling

Nowadays, thanks to the improving capabilities and decreasing price of microcontrollers, the embedded market experiences an explosive growth. Silicon vendors integrate more and more peripherals into these devices enabling them to perform more complex functions. Due to these tendencies, embedded device development became a software heavy task, requiring productivity. To improve business agility traditional software development methodologies made component reusability a central idea as an answer to the needs of productivity. Although building from reusable elements greatly improves abstraction and therefore results in more expressive solutions, it is bounded to the facilities of the chosen programming language. Because of it, traditional methodologies have an upper limit, when it comes to abstraction and therefore unable to fill the gap in productivity, caused by market demands. This paper is intended to revisit domain specific modeling as a toolkit for automation in embedded software development. The presented approach focuses on configuration generation of microcontroller peripherals for fast application prototyping. Our main goal is to give a general idea about recurring tasks in the microcontroller-based development process and to demonstrate automation potentials.