For most microcontrollers, the input and output channels are handled by data direction special function registers. AVR microcontrollers call them Data Direction Registers (DDR) while ARM-based STM32 has a group of “GPIO” registers. PICs call them TRIS registers which is supposed to be short for “TRIState”. In this article, we …

If you are looking to have wireless features on your next project and don't want to spend that much, then an Arduino NRF24L01 solution might be for you. The NRF24L01 by Nordic Semiconductors contains a 2.4 GHz RF transceiver, synthesizer and baseband logic which can be interfaced through SPI. Apparently, …

The “hello world” of microcontroller programming is flashing an LED. As an introduction to Arduino programming, we’ll code several simple Arduino LED sketches; we’ll be blinking an LED, make an LED respond to an input and fade an LED. I’ll also show you how to easily manipulate multiple LEDs and …

Building robots with Arduino starts with knowing how to move objects through motors. There are a lot of types of motors used in microcontroller-based systems: DC motors, stepper motors, and servo motors.  In this Arduino servo motor article, I will discuss what is a servo motor and how to use …

In this Arduino LCD tutorial, you will learn how to display characters (text and numbers) on a 16 x 2 LCD which is very useful in debugging microcontroller projects as well as providing text-based status for your systems.

Before the Arduino became popular, PICs were the go-to microcontroller device for most electronic hobbyists. PICs were cheap and the resources (at that time) were plenty. But then Arduinos came, which offer a much simpler way to code and so only a few now use these microcontrollers. Arduino's strength relies …

We covered the Beaglebone Black I2C basics in our last tutorial. This time, we'll try to communicate with a device through the I2C protocol. This device, the MPU6050, is a gyroscope + accelerometer integrated circuit that is very popular among makers and enthusiasts.

I2C is a popular communications protocol and is used by a lot of sensors and devices. This is why most microcontrollers, including Arduino, PICs, and STM32 have I2C support. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the I2C protocol on the BBB and create a simple Beaglebone …

Most of the time, the data from a sensor in an IoT application needs to be recorded. This data logging is important for later statistical analysis now most popularly known as data analytics. In this tutorial, we will record the data captured from the sensor to a spreadsheet. Let's build …

We set up a simple NodeMCU web server in our previous tutorial. There we controlled an LED from a web page hosted by the NodeMCU ESP8266 board! This time, we'll be displaying data from a sensor connected to the NodeMCU's analog pin.