This post is about designing a simple PIC microcontroller based Solar Tracking system. It requires some basic electronics skills and good motor coordination. This design uses 2 unipolar stepper motors and 4 IR-850nm LEDs as sensors to follow the sun in effort to maximize solar energy received by solar panel. The entire prototype frame was … Read more
In this post I’ll show a more general approach for circuits prototyping. Instead of building each individual design to validate its operation why not to design a basic PIC16F877A based Development Board. Current design have all the necessary features of a simple board, including 10 Segment LED bar graph, 2X16 LCD Display and a 3×4 … Read more
In this post I’ll show you how two QDSP-L149 5×7 dot matrix LED Displays can be used to create a 4 Digit display module. The trick is to change the roles of rows and columns. So now each 5×7 Dot Matrix display can show 2 digits instead of only one. Any other similar 5×7 Dot … Read more
This article shows a basic interface between PIC16F microcontroller and a unipolar stepping motor using an assembly code. For programming the MCU you’ll need PICKIT2 or PICKIT3 device. Similar design for Arduino platform can be found at this link. Instead of using a dedicated motor driver IC like a very popular L293D ULN2003A was used. … Read more
3 Digit Up Down Counter shown here is based on PIC16F877A microcontroller. The count is shown on the 2×16 LCD display and the direction is controlled by a switch connected to bit 3 of PORTA. With minimal changes the attached assembly code can be modified to run on similar MCUs from PIC16F family. Analogous design … Read more