FRM-201 · Firmware & MCU · Practitioner
I2C, SPI & CAN Protocol Firmware — full syllabus
Implementing and debugging the buses embedded systems communicate over, from the firmware side.
Duration3 full days in person · 6 half-days online
Cohortmax 14 in person · 20 online
Pricefrom SAR 7,880 in person · local pricing per city
Delivery35% principles · 20% guided investigation · 45% engineering studio
Who this course is for
Firmware engineers responsible for the buses an embedded product talks over — I2C and SPI on the board, CAN across the machine — who need them to work and to fail gracefully.
Prerequisites
- FRM-101-level bare-metal C
- Basic digital electronics: you can read a timing diagram
- Lab boards and logic analysers are provided
Course outline
Day 1 — I2C
- Open-drain signalling, pull-up sizing and rise time: the physics under the protocol
- Start/stop, addressing, ACK/NACK and repeated start
- Clock stretching: slaves that need it and masters that mishandle it
- Implementing master and slave firmware, polled and interrupt-driven
- Stuck-bus detection and recovery: nine clocks and a clean reset
Day 2 — SPI
- Modes 0–3, clock polarity and phase, and the mode-mismatch signature
- Chip-select behaviour, framing and daisy chains
- Full-duplex reality: what shifts in while you shift out
- DMA-driven transfers: descriptor setup and the throughput ceiling
- Multi-slave topologies and signal integrity at speed
Day 3 — CAN and CAN FD
- Dominant/recessive signalling, bit timing and the sample point
- CSMA/CR arbitration: why the lowest ID wins and what that does to latency
- Acceptance filtering, masks and reducing ISR load
- Error frames, error counters, bus-off and fault confinement
- CAN FD: the second bit rate, longer payloads and arbitration-phase limits
Hands-on labs
- Lab: bring up I2C master and slave firmware on two boards and decode the traffic on a logic analyser before trusting the analyser's decoder
- Lab: inject NACK, clock-stretch and stuck-bus faults into your I2C link and implement recovery for each
- Lab: drive an SPI peripheral in each mode, capture the waveforms, and diagnose a deliberately mis-configured mode/polarity combination
- Lab: move an SPI transfer path from polling to DMA and measure CPU load and throughput before and after
- Lab: build a two-node CAN exchange, force arbitration collisions, inject errors up to bus-off, and implement and demonstrate recovery
Capstone project
Implement a three-bus firmware subsystem: an I2C sensor network, a DMA-driven SPI peripheral and a CAN node with a documented message plan and worst-case latency budget — each with fault injection and recovery logic. The evidence is your logic-analyser captures, the fault logs, the recovery state machines and a bus-load calculation showing the design margin.
What you leave with
- Working master and slave I2C firmware, including clock-stretch and stuck-bus recovery
- SPI mode, framing and DMA-transfer skills proven on a logic analyser
- CAN/CAN FD arbitration, filtering and fault-confinement fluency
- A bus-debugging routine: capture, decode by hand, fault-inject, recover
- Documented recovery state machines reusable in production firmware
Upcoming dates
| Dates | Where | Seats | Early bird | Regular | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov – 24 Nov 20263 full days | RiyadhIn person · KAFD Conference Centre | 4 of 14 | SAR 7,090until 23 Oct | ||
| 29 Nov – 1 Dec 20263 full days | Kuwait CityIn person · Al Hamra Tower | 9 of 14 | KWD 580until 30 Oct | ||
| 29 Nov – 1 Dec 20263 full days | MuscatIn person · Knowledge Oasis Muscat | 4 of 14 | OMR 730until 30 Oct | ||
| 6 Dec – 13 Dec 20266 half-days | Gulf bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 GMT+3 | 10 of 20 | US$1,350until 6 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 9 Dec 20263 full days | OttawaIn person · Kanata North Tech Park | 9 of 14 | CAD 2,570until 7 Nov | ||
| 7 Dec – 14 Dec 20266 half-days | Europe bandLive online · 09:00–13:00 CET | 15 of 20 | US$1,350until 7 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 16 Dec 20263 full days | TorontoIn person · MaRS Discovery District | 4 of 14 | CAD 2,570until 14 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 16 Dec 20263 full days | LondonIn person · Shoreditch Works | 9 of 14 | GBP 1,480until 14 Nov | ||
| 14 Dec – 21 Dec 20266 half-days | Americas bandLive online · 13:00–17:00 ET | 4 of 20 | US$1,350until 14 Nov | ||
| 21 Dec – 23 Dec 20263 full days | BerlinIn person · Factory Görlitzer Park | 4 of 14 | EUR 1,740until 21 Nov |
Book a seat, or bring this course to your team
Seats can be reserved online; private delivery runs on-site or live online, adapted to your stack.
Questions about fit or prerequisites? Email hello@kernelsystems.academy. To save this syllabus, print this page to PDF from your browser.