DIY Mobile Phone
Description:
Students discover how programming transforms electronic hardware into an interactive product by designing and building their own DIY mobile phone inspired by classic mobile phones.
Using a microcontroller, display, keypad, and other electronic components, students first build the hardware architecture of the device and then focus heavily on developing its software.
They create menus, icons, screens, navigation systems, applications, and games while learning how different software components work together inside a single electronic product.
Instead of seeing software as individual programs, students begin understanding it as an organized system that manages user input, application behavior, graphical interfaces, and hardware.
The course gives students the experience of working like early mobile-device engineers: building both the electronic device and the software that gives it its functionality and identity.
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, students will be able to:
- Understand the basic architecture of a handheld electronic device.
- Integrate a microcontroller, display, keypad, and other electronic components.
- Read and process multiple user inputs from a keypad.
- Display text, graphics, symbols, and icons on a screen.
- Understand the concept of a User Interface (UI).
- Design menu-based interfaces.
- Build navigation between different screens.
- Organize software into different functions and modules.
- Understand application states and screen states.
- Handle user input according to the current application state.
- Develop multiple applications within one device.
- Create interactive software rather than simple sequential programs.
- Build basic graphical games.
- Develop a Snake-style game.
- Combine hardware interaction and software interfaces.
- Debug increasingly complex software.
- Understand how software determines the functionality of an electronic product.
- Build a complete software-driven electronic product.