April | 2011 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: April 2011

Lab 12: Basics of LED dot matrix display

Posted on April 28, 2011 by R-B 49 comments

We covered how to interface seven segment LED displays to a PIC microcontroller in two sections: Lab 6 and Lab 11. Today, we will move on to interfacing an LED dot matrix display. LED dot matrices are very popular means of displaying information as it allows both static and animated text and images. Perhaps, you have encountered them at gas stations displaying the gas prices, or in the public places and alongside highways, displaying advertisements on large dot matrix panels. In this experiment, we will discuss about the basic structure of a monochrome (single color) LED dot matrix and its

How to make a contact-less digital tachometer using IR-light reflection technique

Posted on April 21, 2011 by R-B 41 comments

Tachometer is a device that measures the rotational speed of any shaft or disc. The unit of the measurement is usually revolutions per minute or RPM. The traditional method of measuring RPM of a rotating shaft was based on velocity feedback concept where a dc generator is hooked to the rotating shaft so that the voltage induced across the generator’s terminals is proportional to the speed of the shaft. Today, we are going to make a digital tachometer based on a PIC microcontroller that requires no physical contact with the rotating shaft to measure its rotational speed. The physical contact

2 in 1 : Tetris and Snake with one AVR

Posted on April 19, 2011 by R-B 2 comments

This project describes two games – Tetris and Snake, both programmed inside an Atmega168 microcontroller. You can plug this device to a PAL TV and have fun playing the games. The circuit diagram is very simple and uses resistors to generate composite video output.

Make your own motion sensor alarm with SMS feature

Posted on April 15, 2011 by R-B 3 comments

MikroEleketronika demonstrates how to build a simple home alarm system that has the capability of sending SMS to a predefined cell phone number when intrusion is detected. This project is based on StartUSB for PIC board, a small development board for PIC18F2550, which is preprogrammed with an USB bootloder so that no additional programmer is required to load the firmware. The SMS portion uses a SmartGM862 Board, which is a full-featured development tool for the Telit’s GM862 GSM/GPRS module. All the boards required for this project can be purchased as SMS Home Alarm Kit from mikroElektronika. A demonstration software for

MikroElektronika releases their latest universal development board that supports multiple microcontroller architectures

Posted on April 14, 2011 by R-B One comment

Mikroelektronika has released their latest version of universal development board, UNI-DS6, that supports eight different microcontrollers, namely PIC16F887, PIC18F8520, dsPIC30F6014A, Atmega128, CY8C27643, LPC2148, LPC2214, and AT89S8253. A separate mikroBoard for each of these microcontrollers are available, which can be inserted into the main development board so that you can perform experiments with your choice of microcontroller while the rest of the board remains the same. Each of the mikroBoards consists of an on-board programmer so no external programmer is required. The development board is fully featured with regulated power supply, external 12-bit ADC, USB-UART support, USB connector, serial EEPROM, standard

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