Category Archives: chipKIT


chipKIT Tutorial 6: Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) communication

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I2C or IIC (Inter-Integrated Circuit) is a simple bidirectional serial interface, which requires only 2 signal lines for data transfer. It was originally developed by Philips in 1980′s to provide easy on-board communications between a CPU and various peripheral chips in a TV set. Today, it is widely used in varieties of embedded systems to connect many low speed peripherals, such as external EEPROMs, sensors, LCD drivers, port expanders, real-time clocks, etc, to the host microcontroller. In this tutorial, we will explore the chipKIT Wire Library for establishing an I2C communication link between the chipKIT Uno32 board and two I2C

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chipKIT Project 3: Easy Pulse Meter

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This is a third project in our chipKIT tutorial series and today we are going to construct a simple pulse rate meter using our Easy Pulse sensor with Digilent’s chipKIT Uno32 board. Digilent’s chipKIT Basic I/O shield is also used in this project for displaying the pulse waveform and the pulse rate.

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Bi-color LED matrix display board with Bluetooth

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I shared the details of my single-color 8X40 LED matrix display board project here a few months ago. Here is a nice instructable on making a 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED Matrix Scrolling Text Display with Bluetooth support; which means you can send messages and commands to the display via Bluetooth using a Smart Phone. The author illustrates using an Android-based phone, but any devices capable of sending text messages via Bluetooth would work. The project uses 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED matrices, each controlled by two MAX7219 chips. The beauty of using MAX7219 is they take a lot of work off the micro-controller and

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chipKIT Tutorial 5: Pulse width modulation (PWM)

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Pulse width modulation (PWM) is a technique of controlling the amount of power delivered to an electronic load using an on-off digital signal. The key idea behind this technique is that the average DC value of the digital signal, and hence the power delivered to the load, can be varied by varying the duty cycle of the signal. This method is commonly used for controlling speeds of DC motors and brightness of lamps. The switching mode power supplies are also based on the PWM technique. In this tutorial, we will discuss about the PWM pins of the chipKIT Uno32 board

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chipKIT Project 2: Temperature and relative humidity logger

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This project is about building a PC-based temperature and relative humidity logger using the chipKIT Uno32 board and the DHT11 sensor. The project setup requires no additional wires (other than the USB cable) and components; the DHT11 sensor is directly plugged into four I/O pins of the Uno32 board and the project is ready to go. This could be a handy and an easiest way to setup an ambient room monitoring system for a server room. The Uno32 reads the temperature and relative humidity from the DHT11 sensor at preset interval and sends the data to PC through the USB-UART

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