Category Archives: Embedded Lessons


Netduino Day 5 – Writing to an SD Card

Expandable memory is always a plus no matter whether it’s a Phone, Camera or a Microcontroller. Even advantageous if we know how to use it. In this fifth day Netduino tutorial, we will learn a few writing operations about an SD card. We will learn how to write to a text file, shown as an example of writing a log. The Logger class is also capable of creating a text file at any given location then writing some text information to it.

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Netduino Day 4 : Eight Digit Seven Segment LED Display with MAX7219

In Day 3 tutorial, we learnt basics of seven segment LED displays and discussed about a time-division multiplexing technique that reduces the number of required microcontroller I/O pins to drive multiple seven segment LED displays. Today we will move a step further and discuss about a serial interface (SPI) for driving 8 seven segment LED displays. The technique uses MAXIM’s MAX7219 LED driver chip that allows you to control 8 (or more in cascade configuration) common-cathode seven segment LED displays with only 3 I/O pins of Netduino. For illustrative purpose, we will use our 8-digit serial seven segment LED (8DSSSLED) display module here. The benefit

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Netduino Day 3 – Multiplexed Seven-Segment LED displays

Seven Segments LED leg Names

A visual output always adds value to any project. In this third day tutorial, we are going to display some numeric, alphabetic as well as two symbolic characters on a 4-digit seven segment LED module. The way we are interfacing the seven segments LEDs is known as multiplexing, which allows to save some I/O pins of Netduino as compared to driving them individually. The seven segment LEDs are resource and power hungry, but we are going to do this experiment just to get our feet wet in the microcontroller or embedded world and to understand the basics of a seven

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Netduino Day 2: Interfacing a Character LCD

Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) are a great choice of output device for displaying alphanumeric characters in real time. They are also very useful if your project requires an interactive user interface for data input. Besides, they are inexpensive, consume less power than LED displays, and give a more professional look to your project. Today we will explore how to interface an HD44780 based character LCD to Netduino to display alphanumeric characters. For technical details of the HD44780 driver, please read its datasheet as well as its interfacing example with chipKit.

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Lab 21: Servo motor control

A servo motor is a special geared DC motor equipped with an electronic circuit for controlling the direction of rotation, as well as the position, of the motor shaft. Because servo motors allows precise angular positioning of their output shaft, they are used extensively in robotics and radio-controlled cars, airplanes, and boats to control the motion of their various parts. In this lab session, we will first explore what a servo motor consists of and how it works and then illustrate how to interface it with a PIC microcontroller.

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