June | 2012 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: June 2012

Dual 4-digit seven segment LED display with SPI interface

Posted on June 26, 2012 by R-B 2 comments

This project is an extension of my previous MAX7219 based SPI seven segment LED display module. The new display features eight 7-segment displays arranged in two rows of four digits. The on-board MAX7219 driver enables you to easily add eight 7-segment LED displays to your project using only 3 I/O pins of microcontroller. The major advantage of using this board is the time-division multiplexing operations required for continuous refreshing of the display digits are performed by the MAX7219 chip, thereby keeping the microcontroller free for doing other pressing tasks. It is suitable for displaying two variable values simultaneously in a

PIC12F microcontroller project board

Posted on June 23, 2012 by R-B 10 comments

The 12F series of PIC microcontrollers are handy little 8-pin devices designed for small embedded applications that do not require too many I/O resources, and where small size is advantageous. These applications include a wide range of everyday products such as hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, and blenders. Despite their small size, the PIC12F series microcontrollers offer interesting features including wide operating voltage, internal programmable oscillator, 4 channels of 10-bit ADC, on-board EEPROM memory, on-chip voltage reference, multiple communication peripherals (UART, SPI, and I2C), PWM, and more. The following project board is designed for fast

chipKIT Project 1: Digital thermometer using an LM34 sensor

Posted on June 15, 2012 by R-B 2 comments

In Tutorial 3, we learnt how to use chiKIT ADC channels to read an external analog voltage and convert it into a digital number. We also discussed about interfacing a standard Hitachi 44780-based character LCD to the chipKIT Uno32 board in Tutorial 4. Now it’s time to implement the knowledge we have gained so far to make our first practical application using chipKIT, which is a digital thermometer. Since temperature is a non-electrical entity, the first thing we need is a transducer or sensor to convert it into an electrical signal. In this project, we will use the LM34 sensor

Play the classic Breakout game with hand motions

Posted on June 13, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

A group of students at Cornell university designed a new version of the classic Breakout game. The traditional way of playing the game is through key presses that moves the paddle left and right in order to bounce the traveling ball upward, keeping it in play. However, in this new design the player can move his hand left, right, up, or down to control the paddle accordingly. A CCD camera was used to sense the motion of the hand. The image captured by the camera was processed by the Altera® DE2 FPGA Development board to detect the hand position in the image

Multi-purpose dual power supply (5.0V and 3.3V) regulator board

Posted on June 13, 2012 by R-B 19 comments

All embedded systems require electric power to operate. Most of the electronic components inside them, including the processors, can operate at a wide range of supply voltage. For example, the operating voltage range for the PIC16F1847 microcontroller is 2 to 5.5 V. But there are certain applications where you need a regulated constant voltage to avoid malfunctioning of the circuit or getting erroneous results. For instance, any application that involves analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) requires a fixed reference voltage to provide accurate digital count for input analog signal. If the reference voltage is not stable, the ADC output is meaningless. Here

« Older Entries