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...

There is CCS (Code Composer Studio) IDE for programming and debugging the Launchpad. It includes an optimizing C/C++ compiler, source code editor, project build environment, debugger, profiler, and many other features. Also, the presence of Control Suite, a support software containing libraries and examples makes the learning easy. Note: I...

Have you ever looked into the Arduino source files? Well you should be!! I have been hanging around there for quite some time now. The Arduino Servo class has half a dozen functions to handle all the servo related tasks like the attach(), read(), write() and detach(). There was too...

DC motors are really cheap and can be found very easily. In this post we will discuss the basic theory behind the DC motor drive system and its speed control. Having some basic understanding of how your motor driver works will play a key role in building your own circuits...

In this post we will discuss logic and interface of a matrix keypad (4x4 for this post) with microcontroller to reduce the number of port pins required to read a certain number of inputs (digital). The same logic applies to any matrix keypad of order NxN. Where, N is the...

The 7 segment display is widely used to display numeric data. They are limited by the number of segments (LEDs) they have and hence are not suitable for displaying text. There are some variants of this kind of displays that have 11 segments which enables them to display text also....

Stepper motor is a specially designed DC motor that can be driven by giving excitation pulses to the phase windings. They cannot be driven by just connecting the positive and negative leads of the power supply. They are driven by a stepping sequence which is generated by a controller. The...

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...

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,...

The LCD module interface with a microcontroller is simple and it is a primitive means of adding a visual appeal to your embedded application. There are two basic types of LCD modules in the market they are, Character LCD and Graphics LCD. Character LCDs are the some of the cheapest...

In this post I intend to provide a standalone, controller independent, Guide to Timer / Counter Module in Microcontrollers. The concepts explained are not associated with any one particular controller which might not be useful for all readers. To an extent this is an independent post but little exposure to...

Have you ever wondered how your PC and phones keep track of time even when the device is turned OFF? Well there is a Real Time Clock (RTC) that is kept powered even is the device is turned OFF. Once the device is turned ON and connected to the internet...