Articles and news - Microcontrollers - 7

The SAM R30 System in Package, a single-chip RF microcontroller, is now available from Microchip Technology. The SAM R30 SiP incorporates an ultra-low power microcontroller with an 802.15.4 sub-GHz radio, providing multi-year battery life in a compact 5 mm package. The SAM R30 SiP delivers design flexibility and proven reliability all in a small package, making it ideally suited for connected home, smart city and industrial applications...

As in a previous Design Idea, this design uses an LED as a transducer to measure the ambient-light level and to provide illumination. This Design Idea uses the same principle as its predecessor but consists of only one LED, two resistors, one IC, and one 0.1-µF bypass capacitor...

Some time ago I was poking in my box of old components. I was searching something else, but I stopped when a few of nixies came up into my hand. Once upon a time (a long, long time ago) I have mined them from an old calculator...

Analog Devices announced an ultra low power microcontroller unit that addresses the rapidly growing need for embedding advanced algorithms while consuming the lowest system power at Internet of Things edge nodes. The ADuCM4050 MCU includes an ARM® Cortex®-M4 core with floating-point unit, expanded SRAM...

The power-up cycle of the supply voltage in embedded-system applications is sometimes not a clean event. This fact holds especially true in battery-operated systems, because the insertion of a battery often causes significant ringing or glitching on the supply line...

The Arduino began life as a simple and inexpensive 8-bit microcontroller teaching tool. In the intervening decade plus, it’s grown into a diverse platform that has revolutionized the microcontroller education and hobby worlds. Recent, more powerful additions to the Arduino family have added 16 and 32 bit processors and have brought the Arduino into commercial development as a rapid prototyping platform...

When you need an analog output from a microcontroller that does not have a digital-to-analog converter, you can connect an external DAC chip. But for a cheaper solution, use a pulse-width modulated output and add a low-pass filter to extract its average value, which equals the duty cycle of the PWM signal...

Microchip Technology has further expanded its AVR microcontroller portfolio by adding three new devices to the tinyAVR MCU family. The new ATtiny1617 series of MCUs expand the range of AVR devices that feature Core Independent Peripherals, which help increase system throughput while lowering overall power consumption...

The PIC16F15386 family, the most powerful launching point into the 8-bit PIC microcontroller portfolio, is now available from Microchip Technology. In addition to our current Core Independent Peripherals, this family includes a high-accuracy 32 MHz internal oscillator and memory features...

The tiny Pixel 2.0 is basically an Arduino board wedded to a tiny 1.5″ 128×128 color OLED screen. This means you can stick it inside a wearable and address the screen directly from the Arduino board, an improvement on current “solder the screen to the Arduino and hope it works” world of DIY electronics. This teeny-weeny board costs $75 on Kickstarter and should ship in June...