Tutorials

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 …

The SIM800L is a small, low-cost GSM/GPRS module (2G) with most of the features of larger SIM900 shields. In this Arduino SIM800L tutorial, you’ll wire the module safely, send/receive SMS, and make HTTP requests over GPRS — plus fix the most common power and network issues.

Displays are almost always a part of any microcontroller project or embedded system. Fortunately, there are cheap LCDs available with a wide support for multiple microcontroller devices. One is the PCD8544-based liquid crystal display, more popularly known as the Nokia 5110/3310 LCD. This Arduino Nokia 3310 LCD interfacing article covers …

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.

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 …