if I only had a tagline.
After such a good response to Mr. Baybus, I decided to up the ante. I wanted temperature sensing and light control, as well as a more refined interface. I also wanted a chance to write much, much better code as Mr. Baybus was most definitely a kludge. This led to the design of Mr. Baybus [...]
Previously, in PIC buttons (polling) we saw how to poll for the state of a line connect to a button, that is all fine and good but really that is not the best way to do them. The “real” way to interface with external components like that is through interrupts, a slick feature.
Interrupts provide you [...]
Polling for button input, how useful! This is pretty brief and gives a good idea how to let buttons control your programs execution.
In this tutorial I’ve switched from using an oscillator to using a crystal. This changes the design a bit. Using the 2 OSC pins, OSC1/OSC2 (CLKOUT/CLKIN) they hook to the crystal in parallel. [...]
Beyond all doubt, the #1 beginning program in microcontrollers is the LED blinker. It’s super simple, and teaches the concept of pin voltages and busy-waits. Here is a busy-wait LED blinker program, and a walkthrough building it in MPLab.
First, the delay. This is a busy-wait delay program, busy-wait means you just burn instruction cycles [...]
Mr. Baybus is a microcontroller-based fan control system. It is a completely stand-alone unit, with no computer-control whatsoever.
Control comes from momentary switches on the front panel. You have 4 switches to toggle your fans on/off, and a brightness/contrast button, which switches you into a screen to alter those settings. Another press gets you back to [...]
Your basic PIC16 microcontroller can’t hold down the fort by itself, it needs a little help from a few components.
I use a prototyping breadboard, the white kind you can just plug & unplug stuff to all day long. It makes life prototyping a whole lot easier.
Ok, now on to the PIC stuff. First and foremost, [...]
A PCB is much more desirable than just a mess of wires, or even the little breadboards you can get @ Radio Shack. They’re not always the best way to do it, might not be worth the effort, but when you have a fairly complex wiring project, a PCB is VERY HANDY.
So, what do we [...]