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Category Archives: MCU develeopment tools

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

Starting STM8 Microcontrollers

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Shawon Shahryiar 298 comments

STM8 microcontrollers are 8-bit general purpose microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics (STM). STM is famous mainly for its line of 32-bit ARM Cortex microcontrollers – the STM32s. STM8 microcontrollers are rarely discussed in that context. However, STM8 MCUs are robust and most importantly they come packed with lots of hardware features. Except for the ARM core, 32-bit architecture, performance and some minor differences, STM8s have many peripheral similarities with STM32s. In my opinion, STM8s are equally or sometimes more matched than the popular PICs and AVRs in all areas. Unlike PICs and AVRs however, I have seen STM8s mostly in various SMD

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

Development board for PIC16F1938

Posted on May 21, 2016 by R-B One comment

The PIC16F1938 is a versatile 28-pin MCU belonging to Microchip’s extreme low power microcontroller family featuring nanoWatt XLP technology, 28KB of programming memory, 1KB of RAM, 11 ADC channels, and tons of other peripherals. A while ago, I designed a development board for this MCU and I thought it would be worth sharing this design here. The development board features an onboard USB-UART bridge to support the ds30 Loader for easy programming of the PIC MCU. All I/O pins are accessible through 2×5 headers. Summary of Features: On-board 5V and 3.3V regulators Support both 5V and 3.3V MCUs. The power

Dual USB-to-UART/I2C interface board

Posted on March 3, 2016 by R-B 2 comments

Jesus Echavarria‘s new project is a dual USB-to-UART/I2C serial interface board using two MCP2221 chips. This board can be used for debugging UART TX and RX lines as well as providing an USB connectivity in applications that have UART and I2C interfaces. With the help of Microchip’s free PC utilities, you can customize the MCP2221 identifiers and GPIO pins as well as directly communicate with any UART and I2C devices from its GUI interface for rapid prototyping with those devices. MCP221 USB/Serial bridge (A): the basic connection for the MCP2221 converter. It has a small R-C filter on USB lines and a Reset pushbutton.

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