Nokia 1100 LCD Interfacing with Microcontroller

 Displaying content on a normal alphanumeric display is very limited ,we have to be limited with the font size and we can't draw any graphics also. but convention Graphics lcd are really very expensive so here is the solution, you can use Nokia 1100 monochrome  LCD to display your large font text and graphics . the reason behind using this LCD is ,it is really very cheap and can be powered with 3 volts supply. so it is really good for battery powered application.

      Driver IC on this LCD panel is PCF8814 which even though has I2C protocol support - doesn't use it. Instead it uses simple bit-banging mechanism for communication.

Project Description 

       however you can use almost any microcontroller (need a little bit extra circuit to work with mcu who doesn't support 3v) do display content on this LCD, may be that micro controller is PIC , AVR or MSP 430 ,8051 but in this demonstration we will be using Microchip PIC 18F458 Microcontroller.

    The software program for this project will be written in C with MPLAB IDE , This LCD has a resolution of 96 x 65 pixels

Beginning MSP430 Microcontroller with Launch Pad

 introduction to the TI MSP430 low-power microcontrollers

Overview

The MSP430 is a very clean 16-bit byte-addressed processor with a 64K unified address space, and memory-mapped peripherals. The current family includes a variety of on-chip peripherals, and ranges from a 20-pin package with 1K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM to 100-pin packages with 60K of ROM and 2K of RAM. Devices with greater RAM and ROM, and additional peripheral blocks are in development.

The MSP430 excels where low power consumption is important. Many applications, such as water meters, are currently achieving more than 10 years operation from a single button cell battery. If low power is not critical, well, the MSP430 is a nice elegant device to use, anyway. It programs very well in C, making assembly language programming unnecessary. There is no memory bank switching to make the compiler's life difficult; it uses normal RAM for its stack; it has a clean 16 bit instruction set. In fact, it is somewhat like an ordinary desktop RISC processor, but requires very little power.

Flashing the two on board led alternately  :- the adventure begin 

Nokia 3315 LCD Based Temperature Meter

Introduction

 This is General purpose Temperature  meter for measuring Temperature  from -55 ºC  to 150 ºC ..It is a very useful bench test equipment for testing and finding out the temperature of various devices with unknown temperature  such as room temperature , cpucabinet, etc. The meter provides very stable readings and has excellent input sensitivity thanks to LM 35 Temperature sensor from National Semiconductor , so it can even measure small temperature change.

   The LM35 is three terminal temperature sensor which gives output in the form of analog voltage. LM35 linear to the whole temperature range it generate 10 mV/ºC. this analog voltage is feed to the internal 10 bit analog to digital convertor of the PIC 18F458 which convert it into temperature and then display to the NOKIA 3315/3310 LCD.