About a year ago, I wrote a simple library for interfacing AD7705/AD7706 with Arduino. The library works, but it requires some decent knowledge of the underlying chip, which had made it somewhat difficult to use. Most issues users reported can…
LTC6904 is a programmable oscillator which is capable of generating frequencies from 1kHz to 68MHz. The oscillation frequency can be changed via the I2C interface and thus makes it very easy to interfacing with MCUs.
In this blog post, I will show you how to program an MSP430G2 series chip outside the MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) development board using the Launchpad itself as a programmer. This is useful for doing in-system programming without having to swap…
In part one, I went over the theory behind the self-balancing robot and in part two, I showed you my build using a modified toy truck. In this post, I will walk you through the code and show you the…
In my previous post, I explained the theory behind the self-balancing robot at a high level. Here, I will discuss the actual build in more details.
Building a self-balancing robot is one of those things that every hobbyist and engineer want to do. But there are a few hurdles for a lot of people. There is the theory on the one hand and then there is…
You probably know this already from just reading some of the posts in my blog. Like millions of others, I am a big Arduino fan. So I thought I would share my side of the story and you can decide…
I just started playing with TI’s MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) a few weeks ago and have found it surprisingly capable so far. But having to remember all those register names is not an easy task, especially if you do not use…
By default, ATmega328 used in Arduino (such as Uno or Duemilanove) operates under 5.0V. Sometimes though it is necessary to use 3.3V supply voltage to accommodate peripheral circuits that cannot tolerate 5.0V.
MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) is compatible with many of the TI‘s Value Line series of microcontrollers. For these MCUs, both the Master clock (MCLK) and the sub-main clock (SMCLK) can be driven directly by the internal DCO, without having to use…
Since the current Arduino tools do not support in-circuit debugging, you will have to rely heavily on the serial print outs when tracking down those hard-to-find bugs unless you are one of those few elites whose code just works 100%…
This topic is nothing new and there are already quite a few good articles on the web on this. But I thought I would try to provide a more comprehensive view on this issue and give a few concrete examples…
Last week, I received two of the demo boards from Renesas. One is a YRPBRL78G13 and the other is a RPBRX62N. The RL78/G13 promotional board features a 64 pin R5F100LEA 16-bit microcontroller, which has 64K flash ROM, 4K data flash…
One of the biggest advantages of FRAM (or FeRAM, Ferroelectric RAM) over EEPROM is that FRAM has a much higher write speed and typically can operate at bus speed. This means that no delay instructions are needed when performing write…
MMA8453Q is a rather inexpensive accelerometer. It is significantly cheaper than many other 3-axis accelerometers (such as the popular LIS3LV02DL) and yet it offers a reasonably high 10 bits resolution and packs a rich set of features that simplifies designs…