Bil Herd goes through a great Introduction to Analog to Digital Conversion. These days it is very simple to grab an analog reading and use it with a microcontroller with ease. This is because modern microcontrollers often have one or many ADC built in. Not that long ago a would have been needed, this is still the case if a special ADC is needed for things such as high
With the adoption of IOT long runtime on battery power is something that is a huge concern. We don’t mind charging our smartphones daily but if we have a dozen IOT devices in our home we would like them to be invisible and just operate for as long as possible without needing attention. Andreas Spiess has done some research using the popular ESP8266 and a variety of batteries. In his test
It is that time again! There is a new batch of Cornell University ECE 5760 Advanced Microcontrollers Final Projects. If you have done any PID work in the past the FPGA controlled Magnetic Levitation by Gautham Ponnu, Ryan Land, Nathan Spallone should be of interest. They are using a Altera DE2-115 FPGA board to monitor and control a steel ball about 1mm above the position sensor with great accuracy. “The LDC1000
If you have ever installed MPLAB on your development machine you know how heavy this software is. Microchip has now given you a nice light weight option. MPLAB Xpress Cloud-based IDE is now available and will let you get up and running in no time. Thanks for the tip James. “MPLAB Xpress is a perfect starting point for new users of PIC Microcontrollers – no downloads, no machine configuration, and no
GreatScott! has created a great video showing how Brushless DC Motor and Electronic Speed Controllers work. We see lots of these in quadcopters these days. The basic DC motor is popular and simple to control but as more things are using brushless motors it is nice to know how they work. “Brushless DC electric motor (BLDC motors, BL motors) also known as electronically commutated motors (ECMs, EC motors) are synchronous
Laser Duel is a project made by XiaoXing Zhao, Fred Kummer and Douglas Katz for their ECE 4760Â Final Project. The two guns use Nordic nRF24L01 radio transceivers to talk back to a base station which monitors the game play and keeps score. Each gun has some visual indications so the players can see what the health is and there is also a speaker for some audible indications for
If you know someone who is interested in trying Arduino for the first time this is a great looking friendly guide by 16Hz that will walk them through everything from how a microcontroller can read a switch to how the microcontroller can use PWM to output a simulated analog output. There is a hard copy version of the guide available, there are lots of kits and parts available but
