Hi,

I am just about finishing up my second-year electrical/computer engineering course in computer systems. It was super fun, looking at how computers work from the logic level up to the embedded level. We did a lot of AVR assembly and embedded C programming - including making a neat microwave interface utilising SPI, serial communication, interrupts, and PWM. We used the AVR ATmega324A with some provided peripherals and almost everything was built from scratch.

This was easily the most intriguing and fun course I have taken so far and I want more of it. I have used Arduino before for an engineering group project and it was very dull since it was so abstracted from the hardware. I want to make a cool embedded project over the semester break and would like some suggestions for kits with chips similar to the ATmega324A since I cannot find any real kits that use this CPU and almost everything is Arduino. I want to do something using embedded C with bit bashing and some peripherals but I am at a loss of where to start.

I was wondering if anyone also had suggestions for cool projects? One project that I was thinking about could be a self-driving car with some sort of ultrasonic sensor that can interrupt the CPU when the car nears an obstacle and cause a change in direction but I have not yet worked with any sensors (although I would be happy to learn about it).