A Project Example: Firmware Development

Firmware Development for Drilling Rig Microcontrollers

A Project Example

Development of firmware for microcontrollers used on drilling rigs.

Industry: Oil production

Customer: A Russian division of an international oil&gas technology company.

Module description: Firmware for microcontrollers that get data from sensors and send these data to flash memory. The microcontrollers were intended for the prototype of a drilling rig.

Project scope:

Getting data from sensors - accelerometers, pressure and temperature sensors, gyroscopes, magnetometers, strain gauges.
Exchanging commands and data between the microcontrollers via SPI
Recording data to the flash memory installed in one of the microcontrollers
Implementing a PC application for reading and decoding data stored in the flash memory

Technologies and standards:

Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontrollers
RS-485, SPI interfaces

Development environment:

Programming language: C
Development frameworks: IAR Workbench, LabWindows
Doxygen documenting system

Project size:

24 000 lines of C code
5 months, 2 developers