Category Archives: Tutorials


Mastering the SiLabs C8051 Microcontroller

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In a world where upgrades and advancements are constant, it is easy to overlook older technology in favour of newer, more advanced options. However, the case of 8051 microcontrollers defies this trend. Despite being considered relics of the past, there is still a significant demand for these microcontrollers. Manufacturers have revitalized the proven 8051 architecture by incorporating modern features such as ADCs and communication modules, transforming them into powerful, reliable and versatile devices. Silicon Laboratories (SiLabs) is an American semiconductor-manufacturing company, similar to Microchip and STMicroelectronics. They are renowned for producing a wide range of semiconductor components, including both 8

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Exploring STC 8051 Microcontrollers – Coding

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About STC8A8K64S4A12 Microcontroller and its Development Board This is the continuation of my first post on STC 8051 Microcontrollers here. Many Chinese microcontroller manufacturers develop awesome and cheap general-purpose MCUs using the popular 8051 architecture. There are many reasons for that but most importantly the 8051 architecture is a very common one that has been around for quite a long time. Secondly, manufacturing MCUs with 8051 DNA allows manufacturers to focus less on developing their own proprietary core and to give more effort in adding features. Holtek, Nuvoton, STC, etc are a few manufacturers to name.

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Tinkering TI MSP430F5529

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In my past tutorials on MSP430s, I demonstrated how to get started with MSP430 general purpose microcontrollers from Texas Instruments (TI). Those tutorials covered most aspects of low and mid-end MSP430G2xxx series microcontrollers. For those tutorials, TI’s official software suite – Code Composer Studio (CCS) – an Eclipse-based IDE and GRACE – a graphical peripheral initialization and configuration tool similar to STM32CubeMX were used. To me, those low and mid-end TIs chips are cool and offer best resources one can expect at affordable prices and small physical form-factors. I also briefly discussed about advanced MSP430 microcontrollers and the software resources

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Making a SPL dB Meter

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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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Getting Started with Nuvoton 8-bit Microcontrollers

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Many of us who are involved in the embedded system industry like 8-bit microcontrollers. They are cheap, easy to use and solve most of the common automation problems. 32-bit micros are in that contrast expensive and are mainly intended for advance-level works that cannot be solved with 8-bit micros. Thus, 32-bit micros are not much demanding as the 8-bit ones. In most places, 8051s, AVRs and PICs are the most used 8-bit micros. The popular Arduino platform is mainly based on 8-bit AVR micros. However, these are not the only 8-bit micros of the whole embedded world. Nuvoton – a

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