Projects

Digital Clock using PIC16F887

Making your own Digital Clock using PIC16F887

Small LED dot matrix development board I was very busy for the past two months so this blog just didn’t move. As you may know, the LED dot matrix display is my favorite device. I have designed a small development board for testing my led dot matrix related programs. The PCB is single sided so […]

RGB LED Controller

RGB LED Controller using PIC18F452

A very popular type of LED that has finally come about is the tri-color, RGB LED. The RGB stands for: red, green and blue since the LED is capable of displaying all three colors, independently. This means that an RGB LED can display any color of the rainbow. This is a powerful capability, but it […]

PICKit3 Programming With MPLABX

PICKit3 Programming With MPLABX

The PICKit3 is microchip’s newest official PIC programmer and while people argue about how good it is, this programmer has never done me wrong. I upgraded away from the old ICD2 clone programmer that I had used for years when I saw that microchip sells their PICKit3 for under $50 and so now I’ll pass […]

Rotary Encoder Outputs

The Sound Designer – A Portable Digital Synthesizer

Introduction For this design project, we built a portable digital synthesizer capable of creating a wide variety of sounds designed by the user. The system consisted of a full octave (13 key) keyboard with two-voice polyphony, three rotary encoders for user input, a TFT LCD for visual display, and an SPI DAC for audio output. […]

IR Proximity Motor Control

IR Proximity Motor Control using PIC18F4520

Infrared proximity sensors are very fun to play with. In the past we have used them to make Digital Theremins and Control Robots, always using its proximity sensing (how far away an object is from the sensor) as the main feature. Today, we’re going on a quest to use an infrared proximity sensor, to control […]

A Tiny Intelligent Buzzer

The Annoy – A Tiny Intelligent Buzzer using PIC10F202

A while back I made a blog post about a PIC10F200 Project: The Annoy. In this project they combined the simplicity in design along with the creativeness that I always look for, into a project with no real use other than for fun. However, the project seemed a little too large and we felt we […]

led display matrix

How to drive an led display matrix using PIC16F88

Here you can find out how to drive an led matrix with 64 LEDs (8 rows by 8 columns – 8×8 display) or less e.g. 35 LEDs (7 rows by 5 columns – 5×7 dot matrix). It uses persistence of vision to let you drive the 64 led matrix with only 10 microcontroller outputs! Normally you […]

A Real Time Clock

A Real Time Clock using PIC16F88 Microcontroller

This PIC project uses an I2C Real Time Clock IC (DS1307) and a four digit seven segment display to create a standard desk clock. Note: If you typed DS1703 Real Time Clock to find this page you probably mis-spelled the chip type. Anyway you can find a DS1307 (RTC) Real Time Clock IC project and information […]

frequency counter

50MHz 7 segment frequency counter using PIC16F877A

In the same way as the LCD project this frequency counter circuit uses TMR1 in 16 bit counter mode to count the input signal edges. Counter overflows are accumulated to give the total count in multiples of 65536. Adding the current value of the counter at the end gives the total count. Specification of the […]