Amicus18: Arduino-style platform for PIC fans

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Arduino needs no introduction; it is an easy-to-use yet powerful open source embedded system development platform that has gained huge amount of popularity in past few years, specially among hobbyists. The standard hardware consists of an 8-bit Atmel AVR processor with on-board headers providing access to its I/O pins. The processor is pre-programmed with a serial bootloader that simplifies the uploading of user programs to the on-chip flash memory without the need of any external programmer. Because of its low cost, user-friendly software development environment (open-source C/C++ like programming platform), rich set of libraries, and tons of resources available online,

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MSP-EXP430F5529 USB Experimenter’s Board for HALF price!

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TIDeals is offering 50% discount on MSP-EXP430F5529 USB Experimenter’s Board (Normally, it’s $149, and $74.50 after discount), and that includes free international shipping too. From MSP-EXP430F5529 Experimenter Board User’s Guide, “The MSP-EXP430F5529 Experimenter Board is a development platform based on the MSP430F5529 with integrated USB. The Experimenter Board showcases the abilities of the latest family of MSP430s and is perfect for learning and developing USB-based applications using the MSP430. The features include a 102×64 dot-matrix LCD, microSD memory card interface, 3-axis accelerometer, five capacitive-touch pads, RF EVM expansion headers, nine LEDs, an analog thumb-wheel, easy access to spare F5529 pins,

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Lab 18: Matrix keypad interfacing

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Matrix keypads are very common input devices in embedded systems. They have simple architecture and are easy to interface. One good thing about them is that they allow you to interface a large number of input keys to a microcontroller with minimum usage of  I/O resources. This tutorial describes two different approaches of reading input data from a 4×4 (16 keys) matrix keypad interfaced to a PIC microcontroller. The pressed key information is displayed on a character LCD. The microcontroller used in this experiment is PIC16F1827.

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Lab 17: Sleep and Wake PIC microcontrollers

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PIC microcontrollers’ Sleep feature is an extremely useful mechanism to minimize power consumption in battery-powered applications. In Sleep mode, the normal operation of a PIC microcontroller is suspended and the clock oscillator is switched off. The power consumption is lowest in this state. The device can be woken up by an external reset, a watch-dog timer reset, an interrupt on INT0 pin, or port-on-change interrupt. In this experiment, we will discuss how to put a PIC microcontroller into Sleep mode and compare the current consumption during Sleep mode and the normal operation mode.

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