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Getting started with PIC18F Microcontrollers

Posted on April 6, 2011 by R-B 14 comments

After writing quite a bit of experimental tutorials on PIC16F series of microcontrollers, I thought of moving forward to the enhanced-range family of PIC microcontrollers, the PIC18F, which was introduced by Microchip in late 90s. Although PIC16F series are excellent general purpose microcontrollers, certain limitations have emerged, such as, they have limited program and data memory, their stack size is small, and all the interrupt sources have to share a single interrupt vector. Their limited instruction set also doesn’t provide direct support for more advanced peripherals interfaces like USB and CAN. The basis of the PIC18F Series is to address

A Beginner’s data logger project using PIC12F683 microcontroller

Posted on April 3, 2011 by R-B 36 comments

It is a very simple data logger project based on PIC12F683 microcontroller. The microcontroller reads temperature values from a temperature sensor on a regular interval basis and stores them into its internal EEPROM memory. The recorded temperatures can be later transferred to a PC through serial interface. I originally published this project on electronics-lab.com last summer. I thought this could be a very good learning project for beginners, and so I am posting it here for Embedded Lab’s readers too.

DIY remote controlled turret gun

Posted on March 31, 2011 by R-B Leave a comment

Chris (@ pyroelectro.com) built his own airsoft turret gun that can rotate, tilt up and down, and fire very precisely. It is controlled through IR signals from a generic TV remote. The PIC18F4520 microcontroller is the brain of this project, which interprets the received IR signals from the TV remote and control the motion and the firing mechanism inside the gun. It is able to rotate upto 180° or more left and right, and the barrel can go up to 45° towards the sky.

mikroElektronika is launching LibStock soon

Posted on March 29, 2011 by R-B One comment

MikroElektronika has posted an announcement today on their news blog site about providing a dedicated platform (Library Stock) for the user community to publish their ideas that could be in various forms including projects, source codes, schematics and tutorials. Since I am a big fan of MikroC pro for PIC, I thought I should share my views on this topic. Currently, they do have a separate Projects page under their main domain name (www.mikroe.com), and a lot of projects have already been posted there. Once I browsed some of them, and I realized most of them are just source codes

Lab 11: Multiplexing seven segment LED displays

Posted on March 28, 2011 by R-B 54 comments

In Lab 6, we discussed about interfacing a seven segment LED display to a PIC microcontroller. The seven segments were driven individually through separate I/O pins of the microcontroller. If we do just like that then for 4 seven segment LED displays, 28 I/O pins will be required, which is quite a bit of resources and is not affordable by mid-range PIC microcontrollers. That’s why a multiplexing technique is used for driving multiple seven segment displays. This tutorial shows how to multiplex 4 common anode type seven segment LED displays with a PIC16F628A microcontroller.

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