Articles and news - Microcontrollers - 3

For many variable resistor (rheostat) applications, one of the device’s terminals is connected to a voltage source VS. Such a source might be a reference DC voltage, an op amp output carrying an AC plus DC signal, or even ground...

Capturing transient analog signals with a microcontroller normally involves adding a full-fat peak-hold circuit as an external peripheral. This novel approach minimizes that extra hardware by using a µP’s ability to switch its pins between analog and digital modes on the fly...

Figure shows an example of on/off circuitry commonly used in battery-operated devices. The p-channel MOSFET, Q1, serves as a power switch...

Figure silly-simple voltage-to-time ADC is an exercise in dynamic range. Assuming that it is used with a 10-MHz counter/timer, its resolution is roughly 10 µV per count for inputs around 0 V and 100 mV per count at 1 kV, and it never really over-ranges...

Filtering occurs frequently in the analog world. Unfortunately, in the digital world, engineers apply it mainly to the DSPs and not to the small 8-bit microcontrollers that designers commonly use...

Light and Versatile Graphics Library (LVGL) is steadily making inroads in the graphics realm by efficiently facilitating graphical user interface designs in small, resource-constrained, and battery-powered devices...

Sensors such as strain gages, RTDs, and thermistors produce a resistance that’s proportional to force or temperature. If you measure a sensor’s resistance, you can calculate the physical parameter. Circuits such as resistance bridges can help you measure the unknown resistance...

Cortex-M0+ is not the newest small, low-power processor and, in fact, some newer offerings may surpass it. However, its broad deployment and mature environment continue to make the processor a compelling offering for low-power applications...

Analog-to-digital conversion based on the classic combination of a voltage-to-frequency converter with a counter has been around for (many) decades, mainly because it has some durable time-proven advantages...

An excerpt from Christopher Paul’s “Parsing PWM (DAC) performance: Part 1 – Mitigating errors”: “I was surprised to discover that when an output of a popular µP...