July | 2011 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: July 2011

A very simple IR remote control switch for an electrical appliance

Posted on July 5, 2011 by R-B 199 comments

This project describes a technique of adding the remote control feature to an electrical appliance. The goal is to construct a black box where you can plug-in your 120V AC appliance (it can be easily modified for 220 V mains supply too) and control the ON and OFF operations with a TV or DVD remote that uses modulated infra-red (IR) pulse train of 38 KHz frequency. I did this project for my wife who studies late at night on her bed and later feels tired to stand up and turns the light off. Now she does it from bed with

Using Fixed Voltage Reference (FVR) for A/D conversion in enhanced mid-range PIC microcontrollers

Posted on July 4, 2011 by R-B 13 comments

The reference voltage plays a very important role in any A/D conversion. It determines both the range and the resolution (Volt/Count) of the A/D conversion. Besides, the accuracy of the conversion also depends upon how stable the reference voltage is. Usually in PIC microcontrollers, the reference voltage for A/D conversion can be selected as the supply voltage itself or provided externally through one or more I/O pins. But the new enhanced mid-range family of 8-bit PIC microcontrollers have a built-in module that generates a stable reference voltage internally. It is called Fixed Voltage Reference (FVR) where the output is very

UNI-DS6 development board for experimenting with dsPIC30F6014A

Posted on July 1, 2011 by R-B 2 comments

UNI-DS6 is an universal development board from mikroElektronika for experimenting with a wide range of microcontrollers including PIC, AVR, dsPIC, ARM, and 8051. I am going to use this board to educate myself about Microchip’s dsPIC Digital Signal Controllers (DSCs). The dsPIC DSCs are 16-bit high performance microcontrollers and more powerful than regular PIC devices. They are special because they combine the best features of microcontrollers with the computational capabilities of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP), and they are capable of doing complex mathematical operations involving Fourier transforms. I am going to describe briefly about the features of UNI-DS6 board