Posted on 01 Jun 2008
One of the first things people want to interface to a design is an LCD display, both to help with debugging their programs and as a way to provide results to the outside world.
Unfortunately LCD’s require both a lot of I/O lines (7 at best) and require precise timing and command structure that sometimes are not easy to achieve.The easiest way to overcome all these problems is to create a “front end” to the LCD that will accept serial data and thus require only 1 line from the mcu and almost no programming effort to display some text.[more]
Posted on 18 May 2008
This is a cheap alternative to serial LCDs. This post is based in the work made previously by tomek in wiring LCD displays using 4 bits. The basic idea is to group the 7 pins that are needed to drive the LCD in only 3 using a shift register. [more]
Posted on 17 May 2008
This page deals with the construction of the AVR-HID device, a 6 channel, 10-bit analog-to-digital converter device which communicates with the computer over the USB connection. The design and specifications of the device are given, along with the schematic, parts list, building instructions, usage and modification information. [more]
Posted on 11 May 2008
This project was easy in concept, but it did take some work. Of course there’s a lot of soldering, but by far the trickiest part was interfacing the parallel port with Windows XP.It also works for other versions of Windows, and provides replacements for the old Outp and Inp functions.[more]
Posted on 11 May 2008
The clock is synchronised via the German time signal DCF77. It has a display with automatic brightness control and a RS232 computer interface.
Arvin writes:
The clock is built around a PIC16F84 microcontroller from Microchip. I chose this microcontroller since its FLASH memory is easy to program and assembler and programmer software is freely available for GNU/Linux. It has 13 general input/output pins which is just enough to implement all the feature I wanted.
[more]
