In this post I’ll show you how to measure a website’s responsiveness if there are multiple users requesting the site at the same time. We’ll make a simple shell script to simulate those users and make it to display how long it takes.
In this post we’re going to use our knowledge of timers and our LCD setup to make a digital clock. The clock would operate by displaying current time as HH:MM:SS on an LCD display, and the timer would refresh it every second. This setup can then be easily adapted to work as a stopwatch or a timer.
In this post I’ll explain how to operate timers with the PIC microcontroller and give you some examples how they may be used. In general, timers come very useful for all kinds of applications where precise timing is important, such as digital clocks, stopwatches, alarm clocks or PWM. As an example, we’ll make an LED blink in exactly 1/2Hz intervals, (unlike when just using the imprecise system __delay() function).
In this post I’ll show you how to interface an LCD display with a PIC microcontroller from scratch, using no external library. This means we’ll make our own functions for displaying characters, strings and numbers and functions for clearing the display, turning it on/off and so on. You’ll also be able to download my LCD library containing all the functions described in the post and many more which you can use in your own projects.
In this post, we’ll set up analog to digital conversion (ADC) on a PIC18F452, which is a way of converting analog to digital values and can be useful for all kinds of sensors. First, we’re going to test it on a potentiometer — depending on the pot’s rotation, a number from 0 to 9 will be displayed on a 7-segment display from the previous post. Second, we’re going to make an IR sensor which will detect how close an object is to it or if the object is white or black. This can be useful for example for a line follower robot when trying to detect if an object is in front of it or when trying to follow a black line on a white background.