Embedded Lessons | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Embedded Lessons

Exploring STC 8051 Microcontrollers – Coding

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Shawon Shahryiar 17 comments

About STC8A8K64S4A12 Microcontroller and its Development Board This is the continuation of my first post on STC 8051 Microcontrollers here. Many Chinese microcontroller manufacturers develop awesome and cheap general-purpose MCUs using the popular 8051 architecture. There are many reasons for that but most importantly the 8051 architecture is a very common one that has been around for quite a long time. Secondly, manufacturing MCUs with 8051 DNA allows manufacturers to focus less on developing their own proprietary core and to give more effort in adding features. Holtek, Nuvoton, STC, etc are a few manufacturers to name.

Tinkering TI MSP430F5529

Posted on January 29, 2020 by Shawon Shahryiar 24 comments

In my past tutorials on MSP430s, I demonstrated how to get started with MSP430 general purpose microcontrollers from Texas Instruments (TI). Those tutorials covered most aspects of low and mid-end MSP430G2xxx series microcontrollers. For those tutorials, TI’s official software suite – Code Composer Studio (CCS) – an Eclipse-based IDE and GRACE – a graphical peripheral initialization and configuration tool similar to STM32CubeMX were used. To me, those low and mid-end TIs chips are cool and offer best resources one can expect at affordable prices and small physical form-factors. I also briefly discussed about advanced MSP430 microcontrollers and the software resources

Using Easy Pulse mikro with MPLAB Xpress board

Posted on September 7, 2016 by R-B 2 comments

Easy Pulse mikro is our new educational pulse sensor in a mikroBus form factor. Like our previous Easy Pulse sensors (Easy Pulse and Easy Pulse Plugin), it is also based on the principle of transmittance photoplethysmography (PPG) applied to a fingertip. The sensor consists of a pair of IR LED and photodiode to detect the cardiovascular pulse signal from the fingertip. The output of the sensor is passed through a necessary instrumentation amplifier to derive a nice and clean analog PPG waveform. The analog output is routed to the AN pin of the mikroBus connector. In this article, I will describe how

MAX7219 serial seven segment displays for ESP8266

Posted on July 28, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Seven segment LED displays are brighter, more attractive and provide a far viewing distance as well as a wider viewing angle as compared to LCD displays. The major drawback of using seven segment LEDs is they are resource-hungry. Our MAX7219 based serial seven segment LED display modules allows you to add 8 digits of seven segment LED displays to your microcontroller project using only 3 I/O pins, and provides full control of all the digit segments including decimal points. You can even cascade two or more of these modules together without sacrificing any extra I/O pin. Since it requires only

Hookup guide for 16×32 RGB LED panel – Part 3

Posted on April 18, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

In this third part of the 16×32 RGB LED panel hookup guide, we will run some demo sketches with Arduino Uno to display basic text and animation on the 16×32 RGB LED matrix. These demo programs use Adafruit’s RGBMatrixPanel Library are found inside its Example folder. The wiring between the RGB panel and Arduino Uno is discussed in detail in the previous parts of this 3-part tutorial. Click here to read Part 1 of this tutorial Click here to read Part 2 of this tutorial Click here to buy this kit from our US Tindie store Get this RGB panel kit

« Older Entries