Monthly Archives: February 2011


How to measure capacitance with a microcontroller?

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Microcontrollers are widely used in measuring various physical variables. The techniques involved in the measurements could be different for individual variable type and are mostly based on the characteristics of the variables to be measured. This tutorial describes some methods for measuring the capacitance of a capacitor using microcontrollers. The techniques use the characteristics of the capacitor itself and are therefore universal and can be easily implemented with any microcontrollers.

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Where do I buy my electronics components from?

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I have been living in Southern Virginia for past 3 years and I haven’t seen any retail store to shop for electronics components that are needed for my projects, except the Radioshack stores. I don’t prefer to go to Radioshack as the prices are much higher than my budget. A few years ago, I discovered an online store named Futurlec. I was surprised with their prices, their stuffs were really cheap and of good quality. I made 4 orders in the first year, and I was very happy with what I got. The only problem was they shipped their items

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Theory of Matrix Keypad

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Tact switches are widely used as digital input devices. Normally one tact switch requires one digital I/P pin of a microcontroller but if you want to interface a matrix of such switches (say a 16 digit keypad), assigning a digital I/O pin for each key won’t be a good idea. You need to think about the way to minimize the required number of digital I/O pins of microcontroller. A very popular method is a keypad matrix where the keys are arranged into rows and columns so that a 4×4 (16) tact switches can be interfaced to a microcontroller using only

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MikroC Pro for PIC : Installation and Setup

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My PIC tutorials and projects use MikroC compiler for firmware development. But I don’t think I ever posted anything on its installation and setup. Today, I am going to show how to install MikroC Pro for PIC (v4.60) on a Windows PC. First of all, download the zipped installation file from here, unzip it and run the setup program. Installation is straightforward. When you first start the MikroC compiler, it opens a LED blinking example project. You can close this project by clicking on ‘Close Project’ under Project menu.

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Open source color video game development system based on AVR

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This project describes an open source color game development platform based on an AVR microcontroller. You can code a color, high resolution, smooth video game, like Super Mario Bros or Commander Keen on this system. All video processing is done by software in background using interrupts, with no external active components. You only need to connect the AVR to a RGB monitor. AVRs don’t have enough RAM for direct video memory, and therefore a TILE based graphics driver is used. In TILE, the display screen is divided into X*Y tiles and each tile graphic is addressed from reference table located in

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