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.
A microcontroller is an integrated circuit (IC) which is small, low cost and self contained computer designed to handle a specific task in embedded systems. In simple words, a microcontroller (MCU or Microcontroller Unit) is a small computer integrated in to a single chip. We can also explain it as programmable silicon chip which is clock driven, register based, accepts input and provides output after processing it as per the instructions stored in the memory. A computer is a general...
To have a good relationship between human world and machine world, display units plays a vital part. Displays allows us to know what’s happening in a device like the voltage, temperature, present status of the device and even device fault detection etc. LCD's have a very wide application in embedded systems and it is more preferred than seven segment displays. Alphanumeric LCDs are most commonly used in embedded projects since it is commonly available and easy to...
In the previous tutorial we saw how to blink an LED using CloudX board, but in some projects we might need to write to a PORT or a group of pins at the same time. For eg., for designing an 8 LED chaser, writing to pins one after the other makes your code look so bulky but writing to a PORT at once for this kind of projects will make your code look neat and more efficient. A...
Here we are sharing a fully automatic and configurable bell which can be used in schools and colleges. It is made using commonly available microcontroller and other components.
Technology is a never ending process. To be able to design a product using the current technology that will be beneficial to the lives of others is a huge contribution to the community. Generally in today’s modern world human beings are addicted to using modern equipment. So here we can perform home automation by using an Android App and Bluetooth as a wireless communication medium. Home automation not only refers to reduce human efforts but also energy efficiency and time saving. Home...
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...
