Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Microcontroller Current Meter : Simple 3A DC Current Meter Using PIC for PowerSupply

This project is in the series of different small projects i did for new learner in mircrocontroller stuff.
In this project i am using PIC16F1459 mcu for no particular reason , any MCU can be used to implement this project. all you need an ADC and Few GPIO to drive LED display .  I am using internal 10 bit ADC of PIC16F1459 MCU .

Though 10bit resolution is quite low , with 3 Amps rage we can only get resolution of about 2.92 mA per bit. I would love to have a least 1mA per bit or better , but for that either we need to limit our range to 1A or have more than 10bit ADC. To get higher bit in ADC require either external ADC chip or use an MCU with has 12 or 14bit ADC.

i just wanted to keep this project simple and low cost . so i am okey with 2.92mA per bit.

Good thing about PIC16F1459 is , that this part has on chip reference , which we can use with our ADC to increase accuracy and stability .

Internal reference can be set to 1.024 or 2.048 or 4.096 volts.  i am setting to 2.048V.


Saturday, March 25, 2017

E-Ink Table Clock and indoor ,Outdoor Temperatur Monitor With PIC32MX

This is an follow up For the previous post in which i demonstrated how you can drive kindle E-ink display with a microcontroller. 

previously i was using a MSP430FR5739 , which is really low power mcu but has very little RAM and bit low speed to do anything related to graphics. E-ink has 800x600 pixel resolution so it required minimum 60Kbyte of RAM to store Frame Buffer. although you can easily getaway without frame buffer by directly doing incremental drawing on to screen but there are few issue in that because of the way E-ink display works. one more issue with there with MSP430 , it has very low program memory so we need some sort of external memory to store font data and icons. 

so i have decided to use PIC32 microcontroller , PIC32MX795F512H to be exact. which has enough of ram and flash  can go up to 80Mhz. which is more than enough for our purposes. 




























Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Simple Kindle E-ink E-paper Display Driver with MSP430

i have trying to get Kindle 6 inch e-ink display to work with Microcontroller quite some time because i really like the way e-ink display looks. Although many people have done it before but for some reasons there code was not working for me.  i have already tired with a my WireFrame FPGA Board but failed for unknown reason.  So i decided to give it try i designed a new board to give it Second Shot and i finally managed to get it "work" . this time i am using MSP430FR5739 microcontroller for no particular reason. i just needed a part so i used MSP430FR5739 Because i have used this before in my solar LED project.

This this just quick demo of concept to test if i got waveforms right. as MSP430FR5739 is quite slow and does have only 1KB of sram ,Controlling a 800x600 pixel display is really  pain. so i will use some powerfull microcontroller to display rich graphical content on this display.








Sunday, March 5, 2017

Low Power Outdoor Wireless Temperature Sensor with MSP430 NRF24F01+ DS18B20 ,Whole Year Battery Life on Single 1200mAh li-Ion


In this post i am going to quickly describe , how to make really low power Wireless Temperature sensor for Outdoor Temperatur Monitoring. Though in this demonstration i am only having Temperature sensor but in theory you can have any type of sensor connected to processor and get in transmitted over RF.