PIC Projects | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: PIC Projects

Build a digital spirit level using a SCA610 accelerometer

Posted on December 9, 2011 by R-B 4 comments

A bubble or spirit level meter is a handy tool to find whether a surface is horizontal or vertical. It is often carried by civil engineers, mechanical engineers, surveyors, carpenters, and many other professionals whose work involve precise alignments of horizontal and vertical planes. Original spirit levels had two banana-shaped curved glass vials at each viewing point and were much more complicated to use. Mechanical spirit level meters are still available both in 1D and 2D formats. However at present time their electronic counterparts have also emerged and are even available in modern Android equipped cell phones. It’s from there I got

00 to 99 minute timer using PIC16F628A microcontroller

Posted on November 29, 2011 by R-B 31 comments

Last week I was browsing my old backup hard drive and I found a source code for a very simple PIC based digital timer that I made a couple of years ago. The actual hardware of the project isn’t with me anymore. I might have lost it when I moved from my old apartment into my new home. However, I thought this might be a good practice project for beginners and so I am sharing it here. I am not going to build it from scratch again; I will rather demonstrate it using my DIY PIC16F628A breadboard module and I/O board.

Revised version of LM35 based digital temperature meter

Posted on November 6, 2011 by R-B 39 comments

This is a revised version of my LM35 based digital thermometer project that I posted last year. Although it is one of the simplest projects, it is very popular among newbies who are just starting to learn microcontrollers. There was a little flaw in the original project as pointed by some readers. I was using a 1.2 V reference for A/D conversion with PIC16F688 microcontroller. However, the PIC16F688 datasheet says Vref should be equal to or higher than 2.2 V to ensure 1 LSB accuracy of A/D conversion. Here, I am rewriting the same project but this time I am using

Low cost temperature data logger using PIC and Processing

Posted on October 16, 2011 by R-B 35 comments

This project describes an easy and inexpensive way of adding a digital thermometer and data logging feature to a PC. It involves a PIC microcontroller that gets the surrounding temperature information from the Microchip MCP9701 sensor, and sends it to a PC through an USB-UART interface. The USB port of the PC is also used to power the device. The open-source Processing programming platform is used to develop a PC application that displays the temperature in a graphics window on the computer screen. The PC application also records the temperature samples plus date and time stamps on an ASCII file.

MikroElektronika’s “Ready for PIC” board talks to “Processing”

Posted on September 17, 2011 by R-B 3 comments

“Ready for PIC“ is one of MikroElektronika‘s compact prototyping boards for 28 and 40 pin PIC microcontrollers. The board comes with PIC16F887 microcontroller which is preprogrammed with an UART bootloader firmware and thus eliminates the need of an external programmer. The on-board USB-UART module allows the serial data transfer between the PIC and a PC using an USB cable. It has also got a reasonable size prototyping area to add more functionalities to the board as required. These features make this board an ideal candidate for doing embedded projects that require PC interfacing. This article first reviews the basic features

« Older Entries Recent Entries »