Category Archives: PIC Projects


Lab 4: Interfacing a character LCD

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Description HD44780 based LCD displays are very popular among hobbyists because they are cheap and they can display characters. Besides they are very easy to interface with microcontrollers and most of the present day high-level compilers have in-built library routines for them. Today, we will see how to interface an HD44780 based character LCD to a PIC16F688 microcontroller. The interface requires 6 I/O lines of the PIC16F688 microcontroller: 4 data lines and 2 control lines. A blinking test message, “Welcome to Embedded-Lab.com”, will be displayed on the LCD screen. Required Theory All HD44780 based character LCD displays are connected through

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PIC16F688 breadboard module for quick prototyping

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This module is based upon the basic setup circuit for PIC16F688 that I have described in one of my PIC lessons, Getting ready for the first lab. I thought of soldering this circuit on a general purpose ptototyping board and use male headers to access the power supply pins and I/O ports of the PIC16F688 microcontroller. This will free up a lot of space on the breadboard as the ICSP header and the reset switch are transferred from the breadboard to the module. This will make prototyping on the breadboard easier and quicker. The general layout of the module is shown

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Serial LCD Module using PIC16F88

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A varieties of serial LCDs from different manufacturers are available in the market. But if you are good at PIC programming you can make one by yourself. The most popular and low cost LCDs for embedded projects are HD44780 based character LCD modules. They are parallel LCDs because they recieve display data from microcontrollers in parallel format. Their interface require at least 6 I/O pins of a microcontroller. By including an additional microcontroller to your HD44780 LCD module you can convert it to a serial LCD. The idea is very simple. The extra controller will receive the display data from

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PIC-based Digital Voltmeter (DVM)

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Introduction This project will describe how to make a simple digital voltmeter (DVM) using a PIC16F688 microcontroller. The range of this DVM is 0-20V, but you can easily increase or decrease the range of input voltage as your requirements after you understand the voltage scaling method described in this project. The PIC micro reads the input voltage through one of the 8 analog channels and convert it to a 10-bit digital number using the internal ADC. Doing some math with ADC conversion (you will see later), this number can be converted to the actual measured voltage. The voltage is displayed

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Simplest Temperature Data Logger based on PIC12F683

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This one chip data logger uses PIC12F683 microcontroller to read temperature from a DS1820 sensor and store it inside its internal EEPROM memory. The process is repeated in every 1 sec, 1 min, or 10 min interval as selected by user. The stored values can be transferred to a host PC through serial port. The serial communication uses a transistor based TTL to RS232 Level converter circuit to transfer data to PC. This logger can store up to 254 temperature measurements in its internal EEPROM. Each data is 8-bit and the temperature resolution is 1 degree C. With three tact

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