Category Archives: microcontrollers

Smart charger and 5V portable power supply

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SMART CHARGERNowadays almost every electronic gadgets are powered or recharged by a USB port (full size, mini o micro) as well as many of consumer products we use every day, including our smartphone. To recharge or give power to such products, there are many portable rechargers which have a rechargeable lithium battery and the electronics necessary to convert the battery voltage to 5V and to recharge the internal cell. The cost of these smart chargers is very affordable but we’re hardware makers, aren’t we? So why don’t to do it by ourselves to give power to our Raspberry Pi, arduino or Beaglebone black? We’ll show you a possible way to design one of these intelligent portable power supply. Continue reading →

Arduino shields adapter for mbed

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MBED_ADAPTEREveryone knows the versatility of arduino shields and the power of mbed boards so why don’t to design an adapter which allows to use arduino shields with mbed? This is the schematic of our version of such adapter:

schematicAs you can see it is compatible with both mbed LPC1768 (http://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/) and mbed LPC11U24 (http://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC11U24/) and has a USB type A connector and a ethernet connector, useful in your projects with TCP/IP and LPC1768. A DC plug and a 5V LDO regulator Reg1117 has been added to supply power  to the mbed and to the shield in a very easy way, if you don’t want to use the USB as a power supply.

mbed application board

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Mbed family has grown in the last months and nowadays the available platforms include different solutions furthermore the chipsets and the MCUs on this amazing hardware are not only made by NXP but there are many other important players like Freescale and ST:

https://mbed.org/platforms/

 Mbed community is huge and healty and the “competitors” of this prototyping platform (which are many) can’t take the leadership: mbed is still the best development platform for ARM microcontrollers. To start with mbed, one of the most one practical way is using the mbed application board, well suited to test all the features of the LPC1768:

mbed_app_board_

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ChipKIT Pi

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chipKIT_PiMicrochip and element14 designed a very useful board which will add more power to your Raspberry Pi. The chipKIT Pi board has been developed in order to allow users to create advanced applications like touch sensing, audio processing and sophisticated control, thanks to the powerful PIC32MX250F128B. The board is compatible with Arduino and can be easily programmed with the free chipKIT™ Multi-Platform IDE (MPIDE) that can be hosted on the Raspberry Pi. Continue reading →

Blink without delay: Microchip PIC12F683 and 4 leds

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Microchip is one of the most important MCU manufacturer and in our opinion this company produces the best price to performance ratio 8, 16 and 32 bit microcontrollers available on the market. Today we wanna show you how to blink three leds without using the delay macros available in the xc8 compiler “__delay_ms()” and “__delay_us()”. Both delay macros can be very helpful but sometimes it is better to use interrupts instead of to waste CPU cycles with polling. We use a microchip PIC 12F683 (http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?dDocName=en010115) to show you how to use Timer0 to perform more than one operation (apparently) at the same time. Continue reading →