Introduction to microcontrollers

Arduino Getting Started Tutorial Introduction Arduino is a very popular term you will find on the internet if you are an electronic hobbyist. Most people picture Arduino as that popular blue board (Arduino Uno) that is used in many projects. In fact Arduino goes way beyond that. Based on the Arduino website it is described as a platform. However I would describe it more as a very clever standard. With the evolution of microcontrollers in the industrial world, hobbyists wanted to use them for their projects. If you do not know what a microcontroller is you can have a look here: Link . However getting into microcontrollers can be daunting as programming skills are required, hardware cost and software costs need to be considered.   The Arduino comes to the rescue by providing the advantages and bonus features below: 1) A single free and open source software easy to download and install. 2) A single standardized programming language that is easy to learn. 3...

Introduction to Microcontrollers The purpose of this blog post is to give readers an overview of working with Microcontrollers and successfully implementing them in projects. There are numerous information on Microcontrollers available out there but very few give a big picture of the implication of building a project around them from beginning to end for people who have never used them before. What are Microcontrollers? This is the first questions that came to my mind when I first started to get involved with Microcontrollers, what is a Microcontroller actually? In simple terms a Microcontroller is an electronic device which is used to provide control signals to one or more targets devices. The control signals can be used to do simple task such as switch on a led, a relay or it can be a more complicated form of control signal such as a serial protocol signal used to send data through a USB port for instance. In order to send the control signals the Microcontroller ha...