Essential Pre-Competition Guide for Embedded System Design Contest

Competition Experience

Our embedded competition project is a gesture recognition vision detector based on STM32. It displays characters on a TFT LCD screen and uses an infrared sensor module to recognize the direction of the test person’s gestures, comparing them with the displayed character direction to determine correctness, thus achieving vision detection.

Required Skills, Be Prepared

1) Knowledge Base:

The knowledge base required for the embedded competition is largely related to the project the team wants to create. However, the most important and consistent knowledge base is the ability to use microcontrollers. As long as you have learned C language, you can easily get started by learning from online tutorials and familiarizing yourself with some official libraries. You can also learn about the hardware resources of the specific microcontroller used in the competition.

2) Early Preparation:

In the early stages, you can study C language well, pay attention to past award-winning projects, and brainstorm ideas for your own project in advance.

Time Allocation, Avoid Staying Up Late

The time for the embedded competition is relatively ample, with at least a month of preparation time. So as long as you allocate some time each day to prepare the project, you won’t have to stay up late. Of course, we suddenly discovered some bugs at the end and thought of adding a language broadcast function, so we stayed up two nights, but overall, as long as you make good use of your spare time, you can create satisfactory projects.

Basically, the first ten days were spent understanding the board and researching relevant knowledge for the project while purchasing necessary components. Once all components were in hand, we started the actual production. It is recommended to start practical operations early because learning theory often does not compare to learning during practical operations, and during practical operations, you can discover issues that were not considered during design. For example, we initially used a board that was incompatible with the TFT LCD screen. After many days of attempts, we discovered this issue and switched boards in time to continue. The last one to two weeks were spent assembling and testing each component, adjusting bugs or adding improvements.

Tip from Xiao Xin: Staying up late is harmful to your health and your hair. If you want to keep your silky black hair, start avoiding staying up late from now!

Facing Difficulties, Rise to the Challenge

1) Difficulties in the Competition:

The first challenge is how to determine the project of the team. The project must first meet the performance and power consumption requirements of the board, while also considering whether the team’s capabilities can achieve it. Additionally, the creativity and practicality of the project must be considered. Therefore, I believe that a good project design is half the success. The next challenge is how to turn your knowledge into a physical project, during which you will encounter many unexpected problems.

2) How to Solve Difficulties:

For the first point, you may need to broaden your knowledge and learn about others’ innovative ideas. At the same time, you should be good at thinking and analyzing, discovering potential pain points in daily life, and accumulating usable project materials. The second point may require strengthening your foundational knowledge because many problems arise from a lack of comprehensive understanding, and you can also search online for some cases to learn from others’ solutions.

The Significance of the Competition, Abundant Gains

First, my ability to use microcontrollers has improved through the embedded competition, and my problem-solving skills have also been exercised. Additionally, through the competition, I teamed up with classmates I didn’t know before and met more experts. My teamwork and communication skills have improved, and of course, the most tangible benefit is earning some SRTP credits and bonus points for graduate school applications. The embedded competition has effectively utilized my spare time, allowing me to learn professionally relevant extracurricular knowledge through practical problem-solving, which has been extremely beneficial.

Some Advice, Truly Sincere

I hope everyone can actively participate in the competition, work together with teammates to progress and solve problems. If you feel stuck or think you can’t do it, please don’t give up easily. As long as you can persist until the end and complete the project, that is success. The sense of achievement when completing the project will make you feel that all the previous efforts were worthwhile. I hope every student can gain something from the embedded competition.

The interview team is online!

Q: What knowledge do you think is needed for the embedded competition?

Mainly C language programming and basic knowledge of microcontrollers. Other necessary skills can be learned as needed; most required functions have ready-made modules available for purchase, and you just need to read the manual to know how to use them.

Q: Is there any preliminary preparation needed?

Most students may not be very familiar with basic knowledge of microcontrollers, but it is actually quite simple. Spending about a week learning on Bilibili can give you a general framework. It is recommended to check out Guo Tianxiang’s 51 microcontroller course recordings on Bilibili.

(Underline! Valuable information!)

Q: How do you balance competition, study, and life? Do you stay up all night?

The embedded competition lasts for a relatively long time, about two months. As long as you are not particularly procrastinating, you shouldn’t need to stay up all night. We usually find a few half-days without classes to gather and discuss or go to the lab for soldering and connecting peripherals. In the evenings or on weekends, we each handle our respective tasks, and the impact on study time is actually not too much. The key is to avoid procrastination; if you wait until the end and haven’t done much, it might be tough later.

(This might be the time management skills of the top students!)

Q: What does the time allocation for the competition look like?

About a week before the competition starts, we mainly focus on learning, studying some basic operations, and setting up the microcontroller development environment on the computer. After that, we implement one function at a time, taking about a week or two for each function.

Q: What do you think are the difficulties in the competition?

The difficulties mainly come from two aspects. First, when first encountering microcontrollers, it can be a bit challenging, and setting up the development environment on the computer can also be quite difficult; starting is always the hardest part. Secondly, when implementing various modules, many situations can arise that differ from expectations.

(Not giving up is the first step to success!)

Q: How do you cope with difficulties?

The first issue mainly involves practicing along with videos and focusing on mastering the main operations of the microcontroller. Setting up the development environment was indeed quite troublesome for us; I recommend that if you are using the STM32 microcontroller, you can search for STM32CubeIDE, which has download and usage tutorials available online.

If you encounter problems using various modules that cannot be avoided, you should brainstorm with your team members for solutions, and if it is really unsolvable, consider whether you can find a workaround.

Q: What have you gained from participating in the competition? What significance do you think the embedded competition has?

The biggest gain is learning the basic operations of microcontrollers, enhancing practical skills and problem-solving abilities. Finally, attending the national finals allowed us to see many excellent projects and ideas, which was very meaningful.

(Isn’t this the very significance of coming to university for students?)

Q: What do you want to say to participating students?

Creativity is really important. Once you have a direction, it becomes much easier. The rest is just solving whatever problems arise. I wish all participating students good luck and excellent results.