There are instances when digital systems need to interface with devices that produce analog signals, such as sensors and radio equipment. In such cases, the digital system, such as a microcontroller, needs an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to handle the analog signal.

Blinking On-board LEDs The simplest bonescript we can create right now is to blink one of the four user LEDs. The user LEDs are those four blue LEDs just above the miniUSB port: On Cloud9 IDE (192.168.7.2:3000), open a new file (click the + tab) and then paste the following …

When you browse a website, you are requesting the contents of the web page from or using the calculating capabilities of a server somewhere. That server is almost always a Linux machine and server-side scripts like PHP, Python, and Node.Js are used to “talk” to these servers.

Ah, the Beaglebone Black. This credit card-sized computer was meant to be the Raspberry Pi’s competitor and sure lives up to it. Its users are way less than RPi’s, which is understandable, given the Pi’s appeal to beginners and the like. But if you would ask me what to choose …

The 16×2 parallel LCD (HD44780) is a popular liquid crystal display among hobbyists due to its cheap price and ease of use. The Arduino platform recognizes its popularity and created the LiquidCrystal library for it. The Arduino LCD tutorial covers that. I attempted to port the LiquidCrystal library to the …

In my last post, I presented how to get started with the STM32F1 Discovery embedded evaluation board by downloading a package and running the example code. This time, I will teach you how to make a simple STM32F1 program from scratch.

A sensor is a device that transforms physical quantities like temperature, humidity, pressure, etc., to an electrical signal. Moreover, this signal is often fed to a microcontroller like the Arduino for further processing, displaying or recording. This data from the sensor are often analog in nature, i.e., they vary over …

To continue with our tutorial on synchronous serial with PICs, we will know look at I2C, another popular protocol used by sensors, displays and memory devices.

Simply put, synchronous serial protocols like SPI and I2C have a separate line for timing (the CLK line) while asynchronous protocols like UART (RS232) don’t. The addition of a clock line makes reception timing much easier and thus reduces transmission errors. It is also possible to interconnect more than two …

PIC microcontrollers, obviously, can do more than just light up LEDs or reading button states. Microcontrollers can also communicate with another microcontroller or with other devices like sensors, memory cards, etc. Often the communication is done serially, where data bits are sent one at a time. The microcontroller serial communication …