I was debugging IR protocol RC5 and was regretting again and again that I still don’t have a scope at home or at least some small handy logic analyzer. All of a sudden I found the interesting item in the tool menu of Pickit2 software:
I completely forgot that the tool has a couple of useful items – uart, the logic analyzer, some kind of the debugger tool.
Continue readingDescribing my struggles with a menu for my home small project – an audio amplifier. The main challenge is that we have just 3 buttons (the encoder), and two of them are actually not buttons but rotation directions.
First of all, I drafted a block diagram with the logic of the operation (right-left is a rotation direction, down – the button is pressed).
In the previous article, there were a number of faulty determinations. Initially, I thought it should be OK for me, but after some debugging, I realized that such a fault percentage is not tolerable for my project.
Sometimes the cleanest way to design a nice readable schematic in Proteus is to create a separate model with its own graphical symbol with pins attached to this model, not the fastest way but a kind of proper approach within a normal working process.
I was interested in the encoder as you may know, which is not available in the standard proteus component library, starting from a simple drawing of the symbol I would like to use at higher levels:
I needed to get my hands on the encoder, so I started to explore things around it.
First of all, what is the encoder? This is a thing that helps to convert the rotation angle and a direction of rotation to some numbers we can use for our further advance.
Usually, the encoder has three terminals, to connect it I have used the following circuit:
All resistors have a nominal equal to 4.7KOhm.
Continue readingI was working on my personal project – an audio amplifier and needed the LCD display functions, I had already described in my experiments the way to do so, but there were some flaws, so here we are again. What do we need?
In a previous experiment, I made an application (well borrowed) with help of C++ Builder, but I really did not enjoy/like it much. So, I was exploring the web again and found an article. It was much more logical and simple to me, so I decided to give it a shot.
Firstly, we need the Qt SDK. Then we should take sources from here: qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/trees/4.7/src/corelib/kernel files qwineventnotifier_p.h and qwineventnotifier_p.cpp and place them QtSDKDesktopQt4.7.4mingwincludeQtCoreprivate
Also, download the library dedicated to working with a COM port. Good enough, now we are prepared.
The terminal is a cool thing, but sometimes the app is more handy thing to use, plus it simply more attractive than a blank black window. At the moment I was exploring C++ Builder and decide to make a simple GUI for my devboard, so I can control it from my PC.
After I had enough time playing with a thermal sensor DS18b20 and the RTC DS1307 I decided to bundle them together into a single device. Another reason was the fact that the cheap Chinese clock called a day and let its electronic soul leave the nice enclosure. I considered this as an opportunity to put my stuff inside of it.
That is what I got in the end:
+1 reason is that I had a free sample of the “port expander” PCA9539, I mentioned this IC in experiment #13.
Continue readingGoal: To measure the temperature using the DS18b20 temperature sensor
Tools: PIC16f628a, DS18b20, MAX232 level converter, devboard, proteus.
