Tag Archives: microcontroller

GIVEAWAY: Simplecortex v1.3 Cortex M3 dev-board

Simplecortex v1.3 is a Cortex M3 dev-board with an on-board debugger. It’s Arduino shield compatible, so you can turbo charge shields with a 32 bit ARM processor.  It features a LPC1769 Cortex M3 microcontroller from NXP with 512KB of flash, 64KB of RAM, and a 120 MHz top speed. To make sure that the Simplecortex […]

MSP430 microcontroller comparison tool

Compare Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontrollers with this online tool. Differences are highlighted in red: This comparison engine has been developed using data found on TI homepage. As there are close to 400 types of MCUs at TI, it’s often difficult to know at once what differs form 1 CPU to another. This utility is based […]

Connect multiple tact switches to a single microcontroller pin

How to get input from multiple tact switches with a single input pin: A technique of interfacing multiple tact switches using a single ADC input pin was demonstrated using the PIC12F683 microcontroller. A digital input from four tact switches were individually read through the AN0 ADC channel and displayed it back on an LED. While […]

Driving a bicolor LED from a single output pin

This blog demonstrates how to drive a bi-color LED, or any 2 LEDs, by using only one microcontroller pin. Sinking or sourcing current from the LED selects which one will light up. Setting the pin as input turns both LEDs off. Alternating between 0,1, and high-Z, both LEDs are fully controllable and even dimmable. The […]

Fingertip heart rate monitor

R-B built a heart rate measurement from fingertip circuit. He also provided all the design files, and general theory of it’s operation: This project describes a microcontroller based heart rate measuement system that uses optical sensors to measure the alteration in blood volume at fingertip with each heart beat. The sensor unit consists of an […]

What are the topics you need to know to master microcontrollers?

Chuckt asked what goals important to master microcontrollers. There’s been some good suggestions so far, which are consolidated on the wiki: Basic Pins/port/direction (LED flashing) PWM (LED intensity) Advanced UART communication (when and how to use max232 chip) SPI communication I2C communication CAN communication Interrupts (pin – detect button press, UART – communication) Hardware timers Interfacing an […]

Precision analog microcontroller, 12-bit analog I/O, ARM7TDMI MCU

dps writes: Check out the ADuC702x series from Analog Devices. I’ve used them before, and they work well (but note the errata when you start using the A/D, as there is a “gotcha” in starting the conversion). They’re based on the ARM7TDMI processor and have several sleep modes for decreased power consumption. Via the forum.

Followup: chipKIT network shield price, source, and more

Gene Apperson from Digilent gave us more background on the chipKIT network and I/O shields: Price of the Basic I/O Shield: I was surprised at how high our cost was on this board. I had originally thought we would be able to sell it for $25, but there is no way we could get enough margin […]

chipKIT network and I/O shields

Joe Desbonnet writes:   Microchip and Digilent have announced new IO and networking shields for the chipKIT (a PIC32 based Arduino clone) Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, analog and Flash-IP solutions, and Digilent, Inc. today announced expanded capabilities for the 32-bit PIC32 microcontroller-based chipKIT™ Development Platform for the Arduino™ community.  First, the companies […]

BSD Unix on PIC32 microcontroller

RetroBSD is a UNIX port that runs on the PIC32 microcontroller: The system is targeted to a market of small embedded systems. Main features include: Small resource requirements: RetroBSD requires only 128 kbytes of RAM to be up and running user applications. Memory protection: Using hardware mechanisms, kernel memory is fully protected from the user […]

New PIC 24EP256 16bit, 60 MIPS

Nexus tipped us to Microchip’s new PIC24E general purpose microcontroller: Microchip’s PIC24E general purpose microcontroller family features the highest speed 60 MIPS core with excellent performance and code density. It offers superior ADC performance, enhanced CAN communication, easier graphic display interface through 8-bit parallel master port and up to 15 DMA channels for extensive data […]

PIC 24F development board for beginners

Microchip has a new PIC 24F development board for microcontroller beginners. The documentation makes this board stand out. It includes introductory guides to pulse-width modulation, analog-to-digital converters, and other peripherals: The MX PIC24 Module includes an onboard PIC24FJ256GB110 16-bit microcontroller from Microchip that features 256 KB Flash program memory and 16 KB RAM.  The module […]

TI F28M35H multicore microcontroller

Texas Instruments has a new milticore microcontroller that’s overflowing with communication peripherals: The Concerto family is a multi-core system-on-chip microcontroller with independent communication and real-time control subsystems. The F28M35x is the first series in the Concerto family. The communications subsystem is based on the industry-standard 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 CPU and features a wide variety of […]

High temperature floating point digital signal controller

McZ writes: I have used the SM320F28335-HT microcontroller in several projects including military applications. With the floating point it is blinding fast. The standard temperature comes in a QFP and the high temp version comes in a Ceramic Pin Grid Array which is more friendly than the BGA’s. The TI compiler/IDE is cheap by high […]

Modkit beta released

The first public beta of Modkit, an in-browser graphical programming environment for microcontrollers, has been released. Modkit allows you to program Arduino and Arduino compatible hardware using simple graphical blocks and/or traditional text code. Modkit’s graphical blocks are heavily inspired by the Scratch programming environment developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media […]