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 […]
Reverse Engineering the Stylophone
The DubReq Stylophone is an icon of English innovation originally made in the UK during 1968 and famously promoted by Rolf Harris until manufacturing was stopped in 1975. The ‘original’ Stylophone has (since 1975) been remade several times, firstly the ‘new sound’ Stylophone which was based around a 555 timer oscillator and more recently as […]
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 […]
USB RGB LED VU Meter
This project creates a RGB LED VU Meter which is controlled via USB by a Windows 7 or Vista host machine. The project serves several purposes: Firstly, it demonstrates how to read audio information from the Windows machine and pass this over USB to the device (which is a question which popped up several times […]
Rotary Encoder Demonstration
Rotary encoders are very versatile input devices for microcontroller projects, not only do they provide 360 degrees of rotational freedom they also allow digital positioning information to be gained without the use of analogue to digital converters (ADCs). When using rotational encoders in projects it’s possible to use the same encoder to represent a number […]