Simple Digital Voltmeter Featured Image

Simple Digital Voltmeter

Simple digital voltmeter can be built by using PIC microcontroller and a few discrete components. PIC16F877A 10 bit ADC module was used for this purpose, we’ll work only with 8 upper bits to translate input voltage to digital form and ...
Fading-LED-with-PCF8591-Arduino-I2C-Featured-Image

Fading LED with PCF8591 Arduino I2C

Controlling LED brightness with Arduino is one of the basic circuits you can built. Fade sketch is even included in the basic examples in the Arduino IDE. However on Arduino boards it’s done by pulse width modulation, changing the duty ...
Bargraph-Voltmeter-Featured-Image

Bargraph Voltmeter

A simple bargraph voltmeter can be built using 2x16 LCD or compatible VFD display. For Arduino version click here. This design utilizes PIC16F877 microcontroller and its ADC block to convert 0 – 5V input voltage to a binary number shown ...
PIC C Programming Featured Image

PIC C Programming

In this article I’ll show you how to program Microchip PIC microcontrollers using HI-TECH PICC compiler and basic PIC development board. The board consists of PIC16F876A, LED bar graph and 20MHz oscillator. PICKIT3 compatible programmer was used to download the ...
Stepper-Motor-Controller-with-Arduino-Featured-Image

Stepper Motor Controller with Arduino

Basic Stepper Motor Controller can be built with Arduino board and a few additional components like MOSFET switches and a potentiometer to control unipolar stepper motor speed and direction. The principle of operation is relatively simple. When a potentiometer is ...
3 Digit Dot Matrix Display SPI

3 Digit Dot Matrix Display SPI

3 Digit Dot Matrix Display with SPI interface is an advanced version of recently published 7x5 Dot Matrix Character Generator project. This design is more complex as it contains 4 microcontrollers. Three PIC16F88 were used to control 7x5 Dot Matrix Displays, ...
RTC Real Time Clock PCF8573P Featured Image

PCF8573P I2C Real Time Clock

In this post I’m going to show you how to interface an I2C Real Time Clock – RTC with PIC microcontroller. Only a basic hardware configuration and a communication protocol are presented here. I’m planning to extend it to a ...
PIC16F 7-Segment SPI Display Featured Image

7-Segment Display with SPI PIC16F876A

For this project two PIC16F877 MCU's were used, see project schematics below. Slave PIC runs  LEDs decoding and multiplexing code on data received from Master. 7-Segment inputs connected to PORTC,B and common digits anodes to PORTB,A via 2N3906 collectors for ...
Raspberry-Pi-and-74HC595-Shift-Register-Featured-Image

Raspberry Pi and 74HC595 Shift Register

Raspberry Pi I/O capabilities can be expanded by adding one or cascading a number of shift registers. In this design 74HC595 example is shown. 74HC595 is a very popular and relatively cheap IC. There are assembled modules based on this ...
Simple IR Proximity Sensor Featured Image

Simple IR Proximity Sensor

This post is about building a Simple IR Proximity Sensor based on PIC16F877a micro controller. Usually these simple circuits are built using discrete components and include an OP AMP for comparing the photo diode voltage to a preset value. Current ...