PIC

This adaptor will capture plots or prints of your GPIB instrument to your PC through the serial port. It fills the need of anybody who has a test instrument with the GPIB port and likes to get the screen dump on his PC without any GPIB card. Project based on a PIC16F628A microcontroller.

I just finished a half duplex serial asynchronous link from a simple PIC circuit to the RCX. It is able to receive codes from the RCX (or Lego RCX remote control) store them in RAM & EEPROM and transmit any IR op-code to the RCX in turn. Included in the firmware is a routine that takes any opcode(s) and expand it to the proper IR packet for transmission to the RCX. I've used the UIRT circuit with a few modifications for the hardware. The UIRT includes a serial port programmer for the PIC16F84A so you won't need a separate programmer.

I tried to design a timer that would do everything it needed to do but with the smallest number of pieces and simplest mode of operation. It only needs the PIC, a four digit LED display, one other IC, a resistor network, one pushbutton switch and a capacitor. It can run on batteries if you use a solid state relay to turn the exposure light on and off thereby adding a minimum of parts to make a fully functional darkroom timer. A simple regulator would add only a few extra parts and allow the use of a "wall-wart" for power.

The Microchip Technology Inc.?s 24CXX and 85CXX Serial EEPROMs feature a two wire serial interface bus. The bus protocol is I 2 C compatible. Interface to a serial port with I 2 C bus protocol in a microcontroller is trivial. This application note is intended for design engineers

This application note describes the design of a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) compliant board layout to give new radio frequency (RF) designers a head start using rfPIC transmitters such as the rfHCS362 and the rfPIC12C509A. It guides users through the how-to of a typical design process covering definition, design, testing, reiterations, regulatory approval and manufacturing. While focused on meeting requirements in the United States, the RF explanations are universal. Designing your first RF transmitter is a new challenge for most embedded microcontroller gurus. While this application note cannot replace experience, it should make your first experiences less intimidating. Completely understanding RF is complex, so the key is to learn what level of detail is enough to accomplish your task.

The ARINC (Aeronautical Radio Inc) 429 specification defines the air transport industry's hardware and protocol standards for the transfer of digital data between avionics systems. Circuitry that can implement elements of the 429 spec is often an essential part of control and sensor electronics intended for the aviation environment. ASIC chips for this purpose are commercially available, but they typically require nonstandard power supplies (for example, ±15V) and wide parallel interfaces. Therefore, it's sometimes inconvenient to accommodate them in 5V microcontroller-based designs.

This is a general purpose remote control project with using programmable PIC microcontrollers. Schematics are shown for using infrared (RF) or radio (RF) media. If you are not familiar with microcontroller programming, you can use fixed encoder and decoder integrated circuits instead. Well-known such IC-s are Holtek HT-12D, HT-12E and Motorola MC145026, MC145027, MC145028. Remote controls usually consist of encoder/decoder parts connected to a transmitter /receiver module which takes care of the transmission of digital signals by radio or infra waves. The format of this project's signal is designed to be ideal even for the cheapest ASK RF modules (using 50% signal/silence ratio), and it is similar to the Philips RC-5 format used in infrared remote controls. The transmitter has a varying number of buttons and sends the states of these inputs to the receiver. The receiver device decodes the message and sets the outputs accordingly.

This application note describes the design, developmentand implementation of a smart, low cost, stand alone Controller Area Network (CAN) node. It combines the Microchip 8-pin PIC12C672 microcontroller and the Microchip 18-pin MCP2510 Stand-Alone CAN controller. This creates a fully autonomous CAN node, which supports both ?time based? and ?event driven? message transmission.

Alphanumeric LCD displays have become very popular for microcontroller applications because they can add a lot to a project in a variety of different ways. A text message giving the user instructions as well as feedback can make the application seem much more "professional" and easy to use. I like to use LCD's to help debug applications, with breakpoints set to display variable and I/O conditions and they are a lot cheaper than using a microcontroller emulator. To top it off, surplus LCD's can be found for a dollar or less.

PIC 18F4550 and 18F2550 are powerful microcontrollers including a full-speed USB V2.0 compliant interface. With these MCU it's very easy for the hobbyist to design USB devices with very few components. In this page, I will describe how to use the CDC firmware from Microchip. It permits to emulate a serial port with a PC running Windows or Linux. It's also very easy to build HID devices.

This is a simple display controller. It can be controlled with a small microcontroller, such as MCS51, 68HC11, Z80, AVR and others. Several years ago, I found an article that controlling a TV with only a PIC micro controller, and I surprised to it. It is very interesting to attempt to synthesize video signal with a micro controller.

When the circuit is first powered on LED's D2 and D4 light just to indicate the circuit is operating. When the start button (SW2) is pressed all the LED's turn off. They then illuminate sequentially at one second intervals until all five LED's are on. After a random interval between 0 and about 7 seconds the LED's extinguish, signaling the start of the race. Once the LED's have extinguished simply press the start button again to initiate another race start sequence.

The interface uses a PIC16F876 microcontroller and not much else. It performs channel mixing, current limiting, and noise rejection. Push the stick forward, both motors move forward, move the stick to the left and the robot moves left. It makes the robot very driveable. You can use a wheel transmitter meant for cars to control it, in other words, one channel is throttle(both forward and reverse), the other steering.

The PICmicro ® microcontroller makes an ideal choice for an embedded DC Servomotor application. The PICmicro family has many devices and options for the embedded designer to choose from. Furthermore, pin compatible devices are offered in the PIC16CXXX and PIC18CXXX device families, which makes it possible to use either device in the same hardware design. This gives the designer an easy migration path, depending on the features and performance required in the application. In particular, this servomotor has been implemented on both the PIC18C452 and PIC16F877 devices, and we’ll look at the MCU resources required to support the servomotor application.

The circuit presented on this page attemps to be an interface to convert pulses such as provided by a Basic Stamp or R/C receiver to a dual PWM(Pulse Width Modulation) signal required by an H-bridge. The simplest circuit would use a small microcontroller like a PIC. This circuit takes a more traditional approach. Many experimenters will have all the parts already. Total parts cost should be equal to a simple espresso drink, although I have stopped drinking coffee I still remember how much it costs :-)

This holiday season, I was asked by a colleague to build him a LED flasher for a Christmas card he is giving his significant other. As usual, I got a little carried away with this project :-) The result is a "Saturday arvo project" circuit which may be of interest to beginner hobbyists keen to experiment with the popular PIC16C84/16F84 microcontroller. Briefly, it's a 4x4 pixel animated LED billboard of the type commonly seen at railway stations, in store windows and so on - only much smaller, of course.

Alphanumeric LCD displays have become very popular for microcontroller applications because they can add a lot to a project in a variety of different ways. A text message giving the user instructions as well as feedback can make the application seem much more "professional" and easy to use. I like to use LCD's to help debug applications, with breakpoints set to display variable and I/O conditions and they are a lot cheaper than using a microcontroller emulator. To top it off, surplus LCD's can be found for a dollar or less.

This application note demonstrates a simple bootloader implementation for the PIC18F families of microcontrollers with a CAN module. The goals of this implementation are to stress maximum performance and functionality, while requiring a minimum of code space. For users developing CAN enabled systems, it provides a low level framework that can be used with higher level network protocols to develop more complex and custom-tailored systems.

The PIC16C5X/XX microcontrollers from Microchip Technology Inc., provide significant execution speed and code-compaction improvement over any other 8-bit microcontroller in its price range. The superior performance of the PIC16C5X/XX microcontrollers can be attributed primarily to its RISC architecture. The PIC16C5X/XX devices employ a Harvard architecture (i.e., has separate program mem-ory space and data memory space [8-bit wide data]). It also uses a two stage pipelining instruction fetch and execution.

Among the many features built into Microchip's Enhanced FLASH Microcontroller devices is the capability of the program memory to self-program. This very useful feature has been deliberately included to give the user the ability to perform bootloading operations. Devices like the PIC18F452 are designed with a designated 'boot block', a small section of protectable program memory allocated specifically for bootload firmware.