Other Tech

Here is the calculator firmware calculator - you will need to compile it with MPLAB XC8 C compiler.

Below is the link to the C source code for the project. It is compatible with the MPLAB X XC8 compiler only.

thermo_4bit_lcd-c

As Christmas is now on the horizon, I thought it might be fun to design an electronic dice, to give as presents to your family, or just use whilst playing traditional family games during the holidays.

This dice project has seven LED's which can display the possible outcomes of rolling the dice...in other words, 1, 2, 3, 4 , 5 or 6. A single button instigates the 'rolling' of the dice, as the outer six LED's rotate to indicate motion. When the button is released, the dice value is displayed on the LEDS's, flashing at a frequency of 2.5Hz.

This project was created to promote our new vinyl record department in our Hereford store, the idea being to place this scrolling text message display in the shop window to entice customers to browse. As you can see from the short video below, I've yet to build the final display project - what you see is a breadboard prototype.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mro2H9HVaxU[/embed]

Any message can be displayed within reason - it is simply edited from within the firmware. One of the challenges of this project was the fact that although there are many scrolling text projects to be found on the web and shown on You Tube, they invariably use pre-built software display libraries to cope with the driving of the 8x8 matrix displays, the communication between the microcontroller and MAX7219 display driver, and then the animation of the text - these libraries give you no real insight into what is actually going on inside the microcontroller.

I wanted to 'roll my own' display/

Electronics giant Philips invented the RC5 protocol for controlling electronic equipment such as CD players, VCR's and audio amplifiers way back in the 1980's. The RC5 standard has been adopted and used with great success ever since, which means it is probably the most common IR remote control format in your home today. We have recently been playing around with a PIC microcontroller based RC5 decoder programmed in C, with the purpose of testing any RC5 based remote handset you may have. The image above shows the RC5 code for a button press of '1' on the CD player remote control decoded into binary and displayed on the 14 LEDS - the address data for a CD player is '20' hence the 10100 binary pattern on the green LEDS. The RC5 command for '1' is unsurprisingly 000001 in binary as shown on the red LEDS. The two start bit LEDS (yellow) are showing 11 binary and the toggle bit is off. In the pic below the '1' button has been pressed again showing the toggle bit now being set (blue LED).

I got to thinking that an interest in hi-fi can be a bit geek ( in a good way ) so I thought one of my latest geek projects might be of interest to some of you. You could build the project 'as is' without learning embedded C programming or you could use the project as a spring board to extra geekiness and weekend fun - I'll leave that to you :-)

Learning embedded C can be hugely rewarding and creative. The tool chain needed to get you started is either free (MPXLAB  IDE  and XC8 C compiler are both free downloads from the Microchip website and the pickit 3 needed to download compiled C code to your target microcontroller (16f690 in this case) is less than 50GBP.