Reference designs for embedded controls

A set of reference designs suitable for our student design projects was developed and tested. The purpose is to make them available for students to choose the ones suitable for integration into their projects with confidence. All the reference designs are available on our website. Some of those that are intended for embedded control applications are described in this paper. They are reference designs for DC motor driver, stepper motor driver, and GPS module. These reference designs were adopted into our embedded control projects before. Other reference designs were also developed but due to limited space are not included into this paper but the hyperlinks to them are provided. Some of the interesting projects and their evaluations are also described in this paper. Another aspect of this paper is the description of the structure of the reference designs and the various issues encountered. The information should be useful to those intend to develop reference designs for their own design courses.