Here is a digital alarm clock made using PIC 18F4520 Microcontroller and DS3234 RTC (Real Time Clock). This project is for educational purposes or can be used as a reference for integrating DS3234 RTC. DS3234 is a very accurate RTC IC with integrated on chip temperature compensated crystal oscillator. It can be integrated with a microcontroller using SPI bus. This project is developed using MPLAB XC8 compiler.
SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) is a full duplex synchronous serial communication interface used for short distance communications. It is usually used for communication between different modules in a same device or PCB. SPI devices communicates each other using a master slave architecture with a single master. SPI Communication SPI is called as a 4-wire bus as it requires four wires for its communication as shown above. In the case of single slave communications we need only 3 wires, as slave select (SS)...
I2C or IIC or I2C stands for Inter-Integrated Circuit. It is a very popular multi-master, multi-slave serial communication interface developed by Philips. I2C uses two bidirectional open drain data lines, Serial Data (SDA) and Serial Clock (SCL) with pull up resistors as shown below. Unlike UART, you can connect and communicate to multiple devices using the same I2C bus. I2C Communication I2C is a master slave protocol. It means that devices connected to I2C bus will be either master or slave. The...
In this tutorial we will learn, how to use the ADC module of a PIC Microcontroller using MPLAB XC8 compiler. For demonstration we will use the commonly available PIC 16F877A microcontroller. Every physical quantity found in nature like temperature, humidity, pressure, force is analog. We need to convert these analog quantities to digital to process it using a digital computer or a microcontroller. This is done by using Analog to Digital Converters. An Analog to Digital Converter or ADC is a device...
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is the one of the simple and most commonly used technique to produce analog voltages from digital signals. It has a wide variety of applications such as Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), DC Motor Speed Control, Sine Wave Inverters, Brightness control etc. PWM signals are ON - OFF signals (HIGH or LOW) (hence the name Pulse) whose HIGH or ON duration is changed (hence Width Modulation) in accordance with our requirements. The fraction of time period for...
I hope that you already go through our tutorial, Interfacing LCD with PIC Microcontroller - MPLAB XC8. HD44780 compatible controllers used in these LCDs allows us to define 8 custom characters in addition to the standard pre-programmed characters. In this tutorial we will learn, how to create custom characters on LCD using PIC Microcontroller and MPLAB XC8 compiler.
UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver / Transmitter. It is a very popular serial communication interface which provides Full Duplex communication between two devices. UART uses two data lines for sending (TX) and receiving (RX) data. Ground/Reference of both devices should be made common. As the name indicates it is an asynchronous communication interface, which means that it doesn't need to send CLOCK along with data as in synchronous communications. UART is the communication interface used by our old computer's...
Servo Motor Servo Motor is an ordinary geared dc motor equipped with closed loop servo mechanism which uses position feedback to control exact angular position of the rotor. These are commonly used in robotic arms, legs etc. Servo Motors do not rotate continuously, their rotation is limited to fixed angles. Usually these motors have rotation limit from 90º to 180° and some special have limits 360° or more. Servo Motors usually have three wires. RED and BLACK wires are used to...
