Building a Music Player: Teaching Operating Systems Concepts via an Arduino-Powered Music Player

The sequence of assignments outlined in this work targets university level computer science and computer engineering students who are familiar with C and some form of assembly. First, the students build a preemptive mini-operating system with support for multiple thread contexts. Next, the students add in synchronization primitives for sharing values between threads. After the synchronization primitives, the next assignment is to write code to read data from a Linux-compatible filesystem. The final assignment is to put everything together and construct a music player that can play music files stored on a flash memory card. Students also learn about efficient software design when working in a memory-constrained environment such as the Arduino. The end result of the assignments is a music player that students can feel proud of and they fully understand the software behind its operation having built the software essentially from scratch.