Category Archives: PIC18F


Inductance-Capacitance Measurement using PIC18 Microcontroller

When designing or debugging an electrical or electronics device, it is very important to know the values of the components that have been used on board. With a multimeter most of the components can be easily measured and identified but most ordinary multimeters do not have options to measure inductors and capacitors as this is rarely needed. However, without capacitors there are literally no circuits while complex circuits may have inductors in them. A LCR (inductor-capacitor-resistor) measurement meter can be used to determine the aforementioned components but usually such meters are pretty expensive.

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Making a SPL dB Meter

In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design

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PIC18 development board with ethernet capability

DIY development boards are popular among hobbyists. [magkopian] from Greece has designed a PIC18 development board that features Ethernet connectivity (using ENC28J60) and Full Speed USB 2.0. The development board is based on a PIC18LF4553 microcontroller. The microcontroller features a Full Speed USB 2.0 (12Mbit/s) interface without the need for any external components. Also, it has 32KB of program memory, 2KB of RAM and it supports an external clock up to 48MHz, which is optional because it also has an 8MHz internal clock. The ENC28J60 Ethernet controller is used to provide Ethernet connectivity to the microcontroller thought the SPI interface.

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DIY Game and Watch using PIC18F4550

Andrew Hannay has posted this great Instructable about his DIY Game and Watch video game console using the PIC18F4550 microcontroller and Nokia 5110 graphical LCD display. He writes, Back in the 80s when I was a kid, My parents bought me a Game and Watch game called Vermin. It was actually a TimeOut Exterminator. It was a really simple game with just left and right controls and the idea was to hit moles that were emerging from the ground. The screen consisted of pre drawn monochrome lcd images that were turned on and off when they were needed to be displayed.

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

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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