Tips and Tricks | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

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

Setting up the CCS v4 build and debug environment for TI MSP430 Launchpad

Posted on December 12, 2011 by R-B 4 comments

Last year, Texas Instruments (TI) released industry’s lowest cost (only $4.30) microcontroller development kit named Launchpad. It is a complete development tool for rapid prototyping with TI’s ultra-low power MSP430 Value Line MCUs. I also bought a Launchpad kit several months ago but haven’t really looked into it. Last weekend, I spent a couple of hours reading about the MSP-EXP430G2 experimenter board (that comes with the Launchpad kit) and the Code Composer Studio (CCS) software tool. CCS is an integrated development environment (IDE) to develop and debug applications for TI’s embedded processor families. As always, a “Hello World” program is the best thing

Connecting multiple tact switches on a single input pin of a microcontroller

Posted on November 18, 2011 by R-B 6 comments

Normally one tact switch requires one digital input pin of a microcontroller. Some designs implement keypad style multiplexing to get multiple switches on fewer inputs. However, there exist other techniques that allow you to connect many switches on a single input pin of a microcontroller. This tutorial demonstrates one such technique as applied to PIC12F683 microcontroller. In this example, there are four LEDs and four tact switches connected to the PIC12F683 microcontroller. While each LED is controlled through an individual I/O pin, the four switches are connected to one ADC input pin of the PIC12F683 microcontroller.

How to use mikroElektronika’s GLCD bitmap editor tool to convert a BMP image in to a data array

Posted on October 24, 2011 by R-B 6 comments

This tutorial describes how to use the mikroElektronika’s GLCD bitmap editor tool to convert a monochromatic bit map (BMP) image file into a data array so that it could be displayed on a graphics LCD using a microcontroller. The GLCD bitmap editor tool is embedded into mikroElektronika’s compilers. It can generate a code equivalent of a BMP image, which can be easily inserted into the microcontroller’s source program.

Make your own animated LED Christmas sign

Posted on October 6, 2011 by R-B 17 comments

Last year I made a simple LED Christmas sign with very basic animation effects controlled by a PIC MCU. One of my friends, who visited us during the last Christmas, liked it and asked me the recipe of the project so that he could make something similar to decorate his front porch during the next Christmas. In response I gave him the link on my blog where I have described the details of the project. As Christmas is just couple months away, I got an email from him two weeks ago, saying that he has just started working on the project.

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