Understanding Logic Analyzer basics using SCANALOGIC-2 EDU KIT

A logic analyzer is an excellent tool for capturing many digital signals at once and displaying their timing relationships. It is particularly useful in verifying and debugging digital circuits. This tutorial is intended to provide a quick overview of a logic analyzer tool and its uses in analyzing and decoding data flowing on multiple signal lines or bus in a digital system. The logic analyzer tool is extremely helpful in troubleshooting problems arising from timing violations and transients on buses. In this article, I am going to use the SCANALOGIC-2 educational kit from IKALOGIC to illustrate very basic features of

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Netduino Day 3 – Multiplexed Seven-Segment LED displays

Seven Segments LED leg Names

A visual output always adds value to any project. In this third day tutorial, we are going to display some numeric, alphabetic as well as two symbolic characters on a 4-digit seven segment LED module. The way we are interfacing the seven segments LEDs is known as multiplexing, which allows to save some I/O pins of Netduino as compared to driving them individually. The seven segment LEDs are resource and power hungry, but we are going to do this experiment just to get our feet wet in the microcontroller or embedded world and to understand the basics of a seven

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Soldering the SPI7SEGDISP8.56 serial 8-digit seven segment LED display kit

SPI7SEGDISP8.56 is a MAX7219 based serial 8-digit seven segment LED display module. With this display module, you can easily add 8 digits of seven segment LED displays to your project using only 3 I/O pins, and provides full control of all the digit segments including decimal points. You can even cascade two or more of these modules together without sacrificing any extra I/O pin. You can buy SPI7SEGDISP8.56 display kit on Tindie for only $12.00. SPI7SEGDISP8.56 PCB is double layer. The top layer consists of two 4-digit CC LED display modules (Disp1 and Disp2) arranged in a row and header connectors (JP1 and JP2), whereas the bottom

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Introducing a new serial (SPI) 8-digit seven segment LED display module using MAX7219

Seven segment LED displays are brighter, more attractive and provide a far viewing distance as well as a wider viewing angle as compared to LCD displays. The major drawback of using seven segment LEDs is they are resource-hungry. Time-division multiplexing is the most common technique of interfacing 7-segment LEDs to microcontrollers. With this technique, an 8-digit seven segment LED display with the decimal point requires at list 16 I/O pins of the microcontroller, which is quite a lot. Consequently, their use with low pin-count microcontrollers (such as PIC12F series) is not practically feasible. Here’s our latest version of the MAX7219 based serial seven

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