Category: Electronics

In this post, I’ll show you how to make digital gates just out of transistors, as opposed to just using ready-made integrated circuits. We’ll make an AND, OR and NOT gate, and you can make other gates based on these. Knowing how to make digital gates is very useful in all kinds of applications, for […] READ MORE →

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. READ MORE →

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, […] READ MORE →

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 […] READ MORE →

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 […] READ MORE →

In this post we’re going to connect a 7-segment LED display to a PIC18F452 and set it up so that it will show numbers from 0 to 9 in regular intervals, like a stopwatch. This will be useful for calibration of an IR sensor and generally for displaying any number output when debugging. READ MORE →

In this post, we’ll design and build a circuit which will blink an LED controlled by a PIC18F452 microcontroller. We’ll use a power supply, 5V voltage regulator, some safety elements, signalization LED and the microcontroller with an LED we’re going to blink. After building the circuit, we’re going to program the PIC to blink the LED in regular intervals. I’ll be using the programming environment MPLABX and the PICkit3 programmer. READ MORE →