Circuits & Schematics - Microcontrollers Usage - 10

Josef Valasek EDN If you develop an application on a small microcontroller, your diagnostic tools for debugging of the program code might be very limited. This Design Idea introduces a simple debugging routine for plotting the binary value of one ...

This fast-executing program and simple circuit allows a PIC MCU to linearize a thermistor and accurately determine and display the temperature from its measured resistance. When you need to measure temperature using thermistors, you face the ...

This design was done to get a sealed keypad for very wet environments (in my particular case, showers for swimming pools). The keypad needed to be able to detect slight pressure on a stainless steel plate 0.4 mm thick. Apart from water protection, ...

Dev Gualtieri Electronic Design By using a standard, low-cost PIC microcontroller with a short block of code that emulates a simple ramp-signal generator based on the venerable unijunction transistor (UJT), you can achieve smooth output and ...

Embedded systems frequently use HD44780 -type LCD displays as it is considered the most popular alphanumeric display controller. The interface comprises at least 14 pins: eight for data, three for control (EN, WR, RS), two for power supply (Vdd, ...

Didier Juges EDN Many MCU designs are intended to control power to devices such as motors, actuators, or other electronic subsystems. This power switching usually involves using a power device like a bipolar transistor or MOSFET that the MCU ...

Many of the sensors capturing information from the world around us are resistive. A few examples are NTC, PTC, LDR, contact sensors. If we convert the resistance of the sensors into frequency or pulse duration, these parameters can be measured by ...

This Design Idea (Figure 1) demonstrates a new method of driving six LEDs with only two I/O lines from a microcontroller, and so is particularly suitable for any pin-limited chip. It uses a pair of I/O lines combined with a pair of complementary ...

This project is pretty cool for a few reasons, and driving a huge LED matrix with a single 8-bit controller is just one of them. The idea was born when I bought 120 LEDs of the wrong type, and decided to do something with them. With that many LEDs, ...

There are several ways to read multiple switch inputs using a reduced number of microcontroller-unit (MCU) pins. For example, you can use an analog MCU pin to read multiple switches by assigning a unique voltage to each switch through a resistor ...