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Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

DIY plug-in modules to make microcontroller breadboarding easier

Posted on September 26, 2011 by R-B 21 comments

Breadboards are a great tool for prototyping and testing electronics circuits. Here I am sharing with you some plug-in modules that I once made to make my breadboarding life easier. I have used these modules many times in the PIC experiments described in this blog. These modules serve very common functions that are required in most microcontroller circuits. Their use not only reduces the number of wire connections on breadboard, but also expedites prototyping and makes debugging of the circuit easier.

A DIY I/O board for experimenters

Posted on September 20, 2011 by R-B 14 comments

I remember when I first stepped into the world of embedded electronics, I started with doing some basic microcontroller circuits on a breadboard. Breadboard is a wonderful tool for prototyping and testing circuits. When the test of a circuit is successful, you can dissemble it and the board is ready for a new circuit. While working on breadboard was a great learning experience, it was little bit frustrating sometimes when you realized after dissembling a circuit that you have to put it together again or just a part of it for your new project. It happens very often because most

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

Wireless data transmission between two PIC microcontrollers using low-cost RF modules

Posted on September 9, 2011 by R-B 47 comments

A lot of times we need to keep track of data from a device or a sensor located in a remote location from the point where it is processed. In other situations we desire wireless solutions for ease. Using long cables, infrared (IR) or other means are often tedious and not loss-less. Imagine collecting pH level data from a chemically lethal or toxic treatment plant where human presence is highly health hazardous. Running long cables from the pH sensor to the control or monitor station will surely introduce noisy signals and signal-to-noise ratio will thus drastically decrease. The result is

In-Circuit Debugging of PIC microcontrollers

Posted on July 31, 2011 by R-B 6 comments

An In-Circuit Debugger (ICD) is a very powerful and effective tool for real-time debugging of a microcontroller-based system at hardware level. It allows you to run, halt and single step the program while the target microcontroller is embedded in the actual circuit. Once halted, the program variables, Special Function Registers (SFRs), RAM and EEPROM locations can be examined and modified in real-time, thus assists the designer in debugging the firmware and hardware together. In this article, I am going to describe the In-Circuit Debugging technique in PIC microcontrollers, and demonstrate the debugging procedure with a test project using the PIC16F887 microcontroller. Although the operation of

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