About: Ibrar Ayyub

Engineers of my generation in the UK will remember the Science of Cambridge Mk14. Intended to be Sir Clive Sinclair’s first home computer kit for the general public, it served to train a generation of electronics engineers in how to program microprocessors. The Mk14 was based on, and virtually identical to, the ‘Introkit’ that was […]

The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a high speed, synchronous, serial communication standard. This communication protocol is basically a Master – Slave implementation where the master device controls the clock based on which the slave devices operate. The master communicates with a slave or a number of slaves in a system through the SPI bus. […]

Recently I got my hands on a couple of HSDL-1100 based IR transceivers and a KS070B LCD display module. This was a nice opportunity to experiment with three things: (1) controlling an LCD module, (2) serial communication between two PIC microcontrollers, and (3) making this work over an IR link. Serial protocol supports addressing of […]

Microcontrollers are purely digital devices which work on logic0 and logic1 voltages; still they are widely used for analog signal processing. There are specialized signal processors chips available which are custom made for particular applications; however a general purpose microcontroller is more than enough for small kind of signal processing applications like audio signal input […]

I had some beef with my (very) old alarm clock.  It had a radio which was nice to wake up to, but two problems: 1) I would be in bed and think “Wait, did I set the alarm?”  I would have to get up, turn on the light and look at the position of the […]

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is the one of the simple and most commonly used technique to produce analog voltages from digital signals. It has a wide variety of applications such as Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), DC Motor Speed Control, Sine Wave Inverters, Brightness control etc. PWM signals are ON – OFF signals (HIGH or […]

#include <16F877.h> #device adc=8 #fuses XT,NOWDT,NOPROTECT,NOLVP #use delay(clock=4000000) #INT_EXT void EXT_ISR(void){ output_toggle(PIN_B7); delay_us(300); } void Init_MCU(void){ enable_interrupts(GLOBAL); enable_interrupts(INT_EXT); ext_int_edge(H_TO_L); set_tris_B(0x01); output_low(pin_B7); } void main(){ Init_MCU(); while (TRUE) { output_toggle(PIN_B6); delay_ms(1000); } }  

This device uses two digital sensors (DS1620 or DS1820), measures the ambient temperature with 0,1 °C (0,2 °F) resolution and displays it on LCD 2×16 (LM016 etc.) screen. It have a clock, which is based on DS1302 timekeeping chip. This chip stores current date and time. The main CPU used in this project is PIC16F877. […]

This is a little night-light that comes on when it gets dark, to illuminate dark rooms or hallways. I’m sure you can buy these cheaply ready made but it’s more fun to make your own, and this way it can be customised exactly how you want it. Power efficiency The unit is very efficient – […]

Measuring the voltage and current will always be helpful while making or debugging any electrical system. In this project we are going to make our own Digital Ammeter using PIC16F877A Microcontroller and current sensor ACS712-5A. This project can measure both AC and DC current with a range of 0-30A with an accuracy of 0.3A. With few […]