The 16x2 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 …

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, …