Microcontroller Projects

Saturday, August 6, 2016

PIC16F628A Programmable Timer

I was looking for a programmable timer and fortunaitly I could find a great project. First I was trying to build a simple timer circuit using NE555 or 4060 ICs. Then I wanted to move to a rich project with a LCD screen and ability to program for short and long duration times. Then I found this excellent project which exactly meets my requirements.

Then I built this project on a simple vero board and it is working very well. Here are two images of the built project.

You can set the maximum time to 99 Hours and 99 Minutes. The circuit has two options. First you can set the time which your device keep off and then the time you want to keep your device on. The display will show you the (count down) remaining time.

I am using this circuit to turn off and on lights of my house to a predefined time. I also added a battery backup to avoid resetting the timer on power breaks.

You can find more information from the below link. This is the link of the original source of this nice timer circuit.

Link to the original post with schematic and source code download

I should also thank the author Raj Bhatt for posting this great project.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

SainSmart Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Starter Kit

I recently bought SainSmart Raspberry Pi 3 Model B starter kit and not disappointed at all.
I bought it from one of eBay seller and it was very much worth for the price. I received the item even before the estimated date and also in a good package. At the time I write this article, the price of this set was US $51.29

Here is the link of the eBay seller : Link of the Seller

Following items include in this set.

1x New 2016 Raspberry Pi 3 (This is element 14 version)
1x SainSmart ABS Black Case (Fits to the pi well)
3x Aluminum Heat-sink (Average heat sinks)
1x 5V Micro USB Charger Power Supply (Good quality charger, it can run your pi with some loads without any issue)
1x USB Cable (Generic micro USB cable. you can use as your mobile phone data cable too ;)
1x Quick-Start Guide (Basic guide with some information to up your pi)

This set does not includes a micro SD card. And also GPIO cable also not included.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Ultrasonic Distance Measurement with Arduino

We can use ultrasonic sensors to measure distance with Arduino. There are several types of ultrasonic sensors available in the electronic market. In this example, I am using the famous HC-SR04 type ultrasonic sensor. This sensor is cheap, easy to connect to Arduino and highly used in robotic projects to identify obstacles. I will also use a LCD screen to display the distance in both Inches and Centimeters.

Arduino and DS1307 LCD Digital Clock Project

1) Introduction and Images

Hello friends, today I am going to build a Digital Clock using Arduino UNO and famous DS1307 Real Time Clock IC.

PIC16F84A Matrix LED Display

Matrix LED display created using PIC16F84A Microcontroller and 8*16 Matrix display. You can display your own running text message. Two 4017 digital ICs were used to control electrical signals for Matrix display.

Download project details including source code and user guide from the below link

Downloads

*Please note that I used MPLAB Versio 8.3 to build the code. (Not the latest version). If you have any error while compiling the code, please use an old version of MPLAB or use the compiled HEX files to program.

Extracted from the book - PIC Programming. Author - Mr. Sarath Premachandra.(4S5AS) City & Guild London. Credits goes to him.

Monday, April 14, 2014

PIC16F84A Digital Clock

Digital clock made using 6 seven segment modules to display Hours, Minutes and Seconds.
4017 Digital IC also used to control Microcontroller signals over Seven Segment Modules.
Special Components : 4MHz Crystal Oscillator

Download project details from the following link :