When designing or debugging an electrical or electronics device, it is very important to know the values of the components that have been used on board. With a multimeter most of the components can be easily measured and identified but most ordinary multimeters do not have options to measure inductors and capacitors as this is rarely needed. However, without capacitors there are literally no circuits while complex circuits may have inductors in them. A LCR (inductor-capacitor-resistor) measurement meter can be used to determine the aforementioned components but usually such meters are pretty e ..read more

About STC8A8K64S4A12 Microcontroller and its Development Board This is the continuation of my first post on STC 8051 Microcontrollers here. Many Chinese microcontroller manufacturers develop awesome and cheap general-purpose MCUs using the popular 8051 architecture. There are many reasons for that but most importantly the 8051 architecture is a very common one that has been around for quite a long time. Secondly, manufacturing MCUs with 8051 DNA allows manufacturers to focus less on developing their own proprietary core and to give more effort in adding features. Holtek, Nuvoton, STC, etc are ..read more

With the grand success of CROWPI2, an all-in-one portable Raspberry Pi Laptop development platform, Elecrow has now come up with Crowbits: easy-to-use electronic building blocks for young inventors. Crowbits include more than 80 modules that can be easily snapped through built-in magnets to create projects. It also incorporates a graphical programming software -Letsocde, where users can simply drag and drop blocks to develop applications. Crowbits: easy-to-use electronic building blocks for young inventors ..read more

When it comes to STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, art and math) education, the Raspberry Pi is perhaps the most affordable, powerful, and versatile learning tool for all ages and skill levels. The versatility of this little computer comes from its incredible interconnectivity feature that offers direct connection of sensors and electromechanical components, thereby allowing the users to learn embedded hardware and programming in a very simple and engaging way. Since it first came out in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has been the most adventurous tool of teachers in the classroom to foster lea ..read more

In my past tutorials on MSP430s, I demonstrated how to get started with MSP430 general purpose microcontrollers from Texas Instruments (TI). Those tutorials covered most aspects of low and mid-end MSP430G2xxx series microcontrollers. For those tutorials, TI’s official software suite – Code Composer Studio (CCS) – an Eclipse-based IDE and GRACE – a graphical peripheral initialization and configuration tool similar to STM32CubeMX were used. To me, those low and mid-end TIs chips are cool and offer best resources one can expect at affordable prices and small physical form-factors. I also briefly ..read more

In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design an audio dB meter and recreate my child memories. I ..read more

8051 microcontrollers are the first-generation microcontrollers that sparked the modern embedded-system era and established the basic concepts for almost all microcontrollers. In the early 1980s, 8051 microcontrollers were first introduced by Intel. Later other manufacturers like Philips (NXP), Atmel (now Microchip), Silicon Labs, Maxim, etc took the 8051 architecture and introduced their variants of 8051s. Today there are hundreds of such companies which still manufactures this old school legendary micro. of them have even added more features like ADCs, communication peripherals like SPI and ..read more

This post is a continuation of the previous post on Nuvoton N76E003 microcontroller here. Communication Peripheral Overview N76E003 packs basic serial communication peripherals for I2C, SPI and UART. These interfaces enable us to interface external EEPROM and flash memories, real-time clocks (RTC), sensors, etc. N76E003 has two hardware UARTs, one SPI and one I2C peripheral. The UART interfaces can be further expanded to implement RS-485 and RS-422 communication protocols. With ordinary GPIOs and optionally with hardware timers we can implement software-based UART, SPI and I2C too. Howe ..read more

This post is a continuation of the previous post on Nuvoton N76E003 microcontroller here. Overview of N76E003 Timers Since N76E003 is based on 8051 architecture, many of its hardware features will have similarities with a standard 8051 microcontroller. The timers of N76E003 have such similarities but keep in mind that similarities don’t mean same. Strictly speaking in N76E003, there six timers and these are:  Timer 0 and Timer 1 These are both 16-bit general purpose timers with four modes of operation. With these modes we can allow the timers to operate as general purpose 8-bit aut ..read more

This post is a continuation of the first post on Nuvoton N76E003 microcontroller here. About the N76E006 Test Board Shown below are the actual photo, the PCB layout and the schematic of the unofficial cheap N76E003 test/development board. This is the board I will be using in this tutorial series. There is nothing much about the 30mm x 43.5mm board. Everything is visible and neat. However, having the schematic alongside the board layout in possession is a great advantage. There are two sidewise header that bring out the GPIO pins and positive supply rails. There is another header opposite to ..read more