External event counters are pretty useful things to have around. Once I had a feud with a shopkeeper for selling 4 motors in 3 different RPMs. Well, I don’t know if you have ever tried making a robot that had wheels rotating at different speeds, I did. It wasn’t a...

In my last post describing the implementation of a circular buffer I mentioned that I was working on a serial UART library for PIC 18. Well it is now completed! Yesterday I tested all the functions of the library and its working like a charm! In this post I will...

Today when I was hooking up my PIC micro on to a breadboard for a quick demonstration to a friend of mine, I realized how often I needed the Pin Diagram from the datasheet. All this while I have been opening the datasheet and scrolling through to page 4. I...

Having worked with any one Microcontroller, moving from one of its family to another is just a matter of knowing the right tools and understanding how things have to be done in terms of software (compiler specific addressing like that of the SRFs) and hardware (circuitry, design practices, etc., )...

Timers are one of the mostly used modules in microcontroller. Almost every system that has to reliably produce time interval or delays will have to use timers modules. The PIC timer calculator is a cool tool that will make life much simpler. If you haven’t worked with timers, I suggest...

The interrupt on change is a cool feature on microcontrollers. Like you guessed, the interrupt occurs when there is a state change in any of the port pin associated with this feature. In PIC microcontrollers, PORT B has the Interrupt on Change feature. The controller jumps into the interrupt vector...

Migrating to HI-TECH C compiler for PIC MCU is not really a hard task. The developers have taken much care in keeping it that way. In addition to the existing features of the C18 compiler, there are a lot of other added features in the HI-TECH C compiler. This post...

I wanted to make a breadboard breakout for PIC microcontrollers after seeing this arduino breadboard breakout from adafruit. This product is fully standalone and yet has very small footprint so that it can be conveniently plugged into the breadboard. The most amazing part was that it still has 2 rows...

In my previous post Introduction to Stepper Motors and How they Work, we had a look at stepper motors and how they work. This post will deal with the programming and circuitry involved in the stepper motor interface with PIC microcontroller. Usually a microcontroller is used to produce the stepping...

Digital clocks are are very commonly (cheaply) available these days. Some of them have a built in RTC to keep the time running even if the main battery fails and some of them don’t. In either case, for a standalone embedded application to get time, an RTC in almost the...

The MPLAB X is an IDE for developed by Microchip Inc. for their PIC microcontrollers. It has a lot of added features when compared to the older MPLAB IDE v8.xx. TheA MPLAB X is not a new version of the current MPLAB IDE v8. Instead it is a brand new...

This post documents the steps involved in interfacing the LCD in 4 bit mode with a microcontroller. It belongs to a series of 4 posts. If you landed here straight from a search engine, here is an index to help you navigate. LCD Module Basic Theory (LCD Controllers, CG&DD RAM,...

This post documents the steps involved in interfacing the LCD in 8 bit mode with a microcontroller. It belongs to a series of 4 posts. If you landed here straight from a search engine, here is an index to help you navigate. LCD Module Basic Theory (LCD Controllers, CG&DD RAM,...