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Interfacing an external ADC chip to FPGA/CPLD

Posted on April 26, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Chris (from PyroElectro) has posted an article on interfacing an external ADC chip to FPGAs and CPLDs, which do not have A/D capabilities built-in. He illustrates the idea with an Altera EPM7128 and a MAX150 8-bit analog to digital converter IC. The test analog signal is derived using a potentiometer and the converted digital output is shown using an LED bargraph display. The interface between the CPLD and ADC has been implemented in VHDL.

Using CMOS camera for sensing applications

Posted on April 6, 2012 by R-B 3 comments

Ibrahim Kamal from IKALOGIC informed me about his latest article on the use of CMOS camera for sensing applications posted on his website. It’s true that interfacing a CMOS camera with 8-bit microcontrollers has not been very common. There’s a stereotype that much faster and powerful microcontrollers are required to process the output of a CMOS camera, which may not always be true, as illustrated by Ibrahim Kamam. In fact, it all depends on the type of application you choose with a CMOS camera. The article discusses about the possibility of using a CMOS camera for sensing applications by reducing

New 8-bit PIC microcontrollers feature advanced analog and digital integration

Posted on March 28, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

There is a good news for PIC fans. Microchip Technology, Inc. has recently announced the expansion of its 8-bit enhanced Mid-range core microcontroller (MCU) family to include advanced analog and digital integration, such as 12-bit A/D converter, 8-bit DAC, Op-Amps with Rail-to-Rail input/output, and high-performance Rail-to-Rail comparators. CHANDLER, Ariz., March 26, 2012 [NASDAQ: MCHP] — Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced from DESIGN West in San Jose the expansion of its 8-bit PIC16F(LF)178X enhanced Mid-range core microcontroller (MCU) family to include advanced analog and integrated communication peripherals, such as on-chip 12-bit Analog-to-Digital

Digilent announces the 8th annual US regional design contest

Posted on January 26, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Digilent has just announced the 8th annual US regional Digilent Design Contest, to be held on May 6-7, 2012 in conjunction with the IEEE EIT conference in Indianapolis. Digilent Design Contests are engineering contests open to all students enrolled in any educational institution in that region. Students are challenged to create an original project using Digilent boards, whether FPGA boards featuring state-of-the-art Xilinx FPGAs, microcontroller boards featuring Microchip microcontrollers, or chipKIT boards based on the Arduino development environment. Contest enrollment begins on January 25th. Project presentations and judging will take place on May 6th, with the winners to be announced

Lab 20: Interfacing a KS0108 based Graphics LCD (Part 1)

Posted on December 20, 2011 by R-B 36 comments

The use of a graphical LCD (GLCD) drastically changes the look of your project. It provides more freedom for presenting data than the HD44870 based character LCDs. Today we will see how to interface a KS0108 (name of the display controller chip) based GLCD to a PIC microcontroller. This experimental tutorial is divided into two parts. In the first part, we will see how to write a firmware for the PIC microcontroller to initialize the GLCD and send data to plot points and lines on the screen. The second part will focus more on exploring the built-in GLCD Library of

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