Archive for 'Microcontroller'
The LED Chasing Effect Project using Atmel AVR Microcontroller
October 8, 2014 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
One of the interesting projects for most of the embedded beginners enthusiasts or hobbyists is to build the LED chasing effect. In this project we are going to use both the Arduino IDE and Atmel AVR Studio to program the AVR ATMega168 microcontroller, therefore you could learn to use these well known Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to program the project. (more…)
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Building the I2C Smart DC Motor Controller with Atmel AVR Microcontroller – Part 1
June 12, 2013 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
The idea of building my own I2C (read as I square C) smart DC motor controller is came to me when I was learning and playing together with my son on his LEGO® MINDSTORM® NXT 2.0 about a year ago. The NXT sophisticated controller also called NXT Intelligent Brick is powered by Atmel 32-bit ARM7 AT91SAM7S256 microcontroller and communicating with Atmel 8-bit AVR ATmega48 acting as a co-microcontroller using I2C protocol. (more…)
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Build your own stopwatch using Maxim MAX7219 Serially Interfaced, 8-Digit LED Display Drivers
December 29, 2012 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
One of the basic usage of the TIMER peripheral on every microcontroller is to provide the accurate timing mechanism. Using the TIMER peripheral as the basic timing, we could easily develop a stopwatch and display it to the 8-Digit seven segment numeric LED display. Thanks to the Maxim MAX7219 chip which enable us to interface this 8-Digit seven segment LED display much easier using just three wires of the SPI (serial peripheral interface) to display the hour, minute, second, and hundredth of seconds to the 8-Digit seven segments LED display.
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Developing Embedded Application with BASIC Language on the Microchip PIC18F Microcontroller using the Amicus18 Development system
December 24, 2011 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
The BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) language has been known as one of the popular high level language choice in embedded system today. In fact the born and development of the personal computer (PC) we use today has been influenced by the used of BASIC language. Today there are many of professional BASIC language development tools variant targeting the Microchip PIC microcontroller.
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Interfacing the Microchip PIC18F Microcontroller Master Synchronous Serial Port (MSSP) to various I2C Devices
December 11, 2011 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
The Inter-Integrated Circuit or I2C (read as I square C) bus has been introduced in 1980 by Philips, and has become a de-facto world standard for data exchange between Microcontroller and various devices such as temperature sensor, ADC (analog to digital converter), DAC (digital to analog converter), I/O expander, EEPROM, and many more. With more than thousand different IC devices have been manufactured with an I2C-bus interface, making the understanding of the working principle of this I2C bus is an essential knowledge that has to be acquired by anyone who want to involve in the embedded world professionally or just as hobbyist. (more…)
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Make Your Own Arduino Shield Cradle
July 3, 2011 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
One of the advantages with the open source software and hardware such as Arduino (based on Atmel 8-bit AVR ATMega328 microcontroller) is the enormous “add-on” hardware called “Arduino Shield” that we could easily expand the Arduino main board and turn it into many cool and useful embedded system applications e.g. DC motor controller, web server, wireless application, GSM/GPRS modem and many more. The Arduino framework is so popular that many vendors come with their new Arduino shield module design almost every year.
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Working with Atmel AVR Microcontroller Basic Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) Peripheral
April 30, 2011 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is a technique widely used in modern switching circuit to control the amount of power given to the electrical device. This method simply switches ON and OFF the power supplied to the electrical device rapidly. The average amount of energy received by the electrical device is corresponding to the ON and OFF period (duty cycle); therefore by varying the ON period i.e. longer or shorter, we could easily control the amount of energy received by the electrical device. The Light Emitting Diode (LED) will respond to this pulse by dimming or brighten its light while the electrical motor will respond to this pulse by turning its rotor slow or fast. (more…)
