Category Archives: PIC Microcontroller

Articles for projects that use the Microchip PIC microcontroller

Vetinari’s Clock

In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make […]

RC Servo Processor

On a continuing mission to build an autonomous sailing robot we needed a way to more rapidly prototype boat designs and wanted to use a standard remote control model control system to save time by using off-the-shelf parts. When controlling servos with microcontroller based electronics you can use the full 180 degrees of rotation; however […]

RC Servo Switcher

Some fellow members of The Abbenay Hackspace (an open hacker space based in Stockholm, Sweden) are embarked on an ambitious project with the aim of being the first to build an autonomous sailing robot which is capable of circumnavigating the Earth. The project is currently in the early prototyping stages and this RC Servo Switcher […]

RGB LED Love Heart

This project creates a RGB LED lit love heart which is controlled by a PIC12F683 microcontroller. I designed the project as a gift for my wife on our 15th wedding anniversary (since she puts up with my addiction to electronics I thought she deserved something in return!). The love heart is made from a 200x150x6mm […]

MicroSimon

This project shows how to create an MB Electronics Simon game clone using an 8-pin PIC12F683 microcontroller. The game includes a full emulation of the original Simon ‘game 1’ and the ability to select from 4 skill levels which control the number of colours you must repeat in a sequence in order to win the […]

Secure USB Time-Stamp for Data-Logging

This project implements a USB device which provides a real-time clock for the purpose of time-stamping events in an non-networked embedded computer environment. For embedded applications where a periodic time-stamp is required (such as entry-system logs, configuration audit logs, etc.) it is necessary to have a fairly accurate real-time clock (better than that typically provided […]

Real-Time Audio Spectrum Analyser

This project implements a real-time audio spectrum analyser using a PIC18F4550 8-bit microcontroller. The spectrum frequency analysis is performed by a highly optimised 16-bit Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) routine coded entirely in C. The output from the FFT is displayed using a 128×64 graphical LCD to allow a real-time view of an audio signal. YouTube […]

ToothPIC

If you regularly breadboard USB designs you’ll know that every project requires you to build the basic building block of a PIC and associated components for USB communication before continuing with your experimental design. ToothPIC is a very small PIC18F2550 board which includes the required PIC microcontroller, 20Mhz clock, USB connector and the standard passives […]

PC Case USB LCD

For the first version of my Open Source Framework for USB Generic HID devices based on the PIC18F and Windows I made a quick example of how to use the library using a USB interface for an LCD. Now that I’ve completed the second version of the library I thought it would be fun to […]

PIC18F USART implementation with Go-back-N ARQ

As part of an ongoing project to build a robot based around the PIC18F range of microcontrollers I decided recently that the flexibility of the robot would be greatly improved with the inclusion of a two-way radio link which interfaced the robot with a computer via USB. To do this I purchase two Easy Radio […]