March | 2011 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: March 2011

DIY remote controlled turret gun

Posted on March 31, 2011 by R-B Leave a comment

Chris (@ pyroelectro.com) built his own airsoft turret gun that can rotate, tilt up and down, and fire very precisely. It is controlled through IR signals from a generic TV remote. The PIC18F4520 microcontroller is the brain of this project, which interprets the received IR signals from the TV remote and control the motion and the firing mechanism inside the gun. It is able to rotate upto 180° or more left and right, and the barrel can go up to 45° towards the sky.

mikroElektronika is launching LibStock soon

Posted on March 29, 2011 by R-B One comment

MikroElektronika has posted an announcement today on their news blog site about providing a dedicated platform (Library Stock) for the user community to publish their ideas that could be in various forms including projects, source codes, schematics and tutorials. Since I am a big fan of MikroC pro for PIC, I thought I should share my views on this topic. Currently, they do have a separate Projects page under their main domain name (www.mikroe.com), and a lot of projects have already been posted there. Once I browsed some of them, and I realized most of them are just source codes

Lab 11: Multiplexing seven segment LED displays

Posted on March 28, 2011 by R-B 54 comments

In Lab 6, we discussed about interfacing a seven segment LED display to a PIC microcontroller. The seven segments were driven individually through separate I/O pins of the microcontroller. If we do just like that then for 4 seven segment LED displays, 28 I/O pins will be required, which is quite a bit of resources and is not affordable by mid-range PIC microcontrollers. That’s why a multiplexing technique is used for driving multiple seven segment displays. This tutorial shows how to multiplex 4 common anode type seven segment LED displays with a PIC16F628A microcontroller.

A new multi-function power supply unit for my Embedded Lab

Posted on March 26, 2011 by R-B 39 comments

One important parameter in embedded system designing is power consumption. This parameter is directly related to the battery lifetime, if the system is to be powered from a battery. In order to determine the power rating of your designed system, you need to know how much current the system draws from the source at a given voltage. While working on my projects, I usually measure current by placing an external ammeter in series with the current’s return path. This is not always convenient to do, and so I thought of making a special power supply unit for my lab that

AVR based remote controlled fan regulator

Posted on March 25, 2011 by R-B 5 comments

This project is from Extreme Electronics that describes an AVR-based (Atmega8) remotely controlled fan regulator. The control commands are received through a DVD player remote control. With three buttons on the remote control, you can turn the fan On and Off and also conotrol the speed. You can also purchase the PCB for this project too.

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