Introduction to microcontrollers

Introduction The STM8 series of 8 bit microcontrollers are made by ST. The STM8 micorocontrollers have seen their price dramatically reduced by ST and can be easily found on sites like Ebay and Ali Express. They are quite poweful but unfortunately there are very few online resources to help anyone get started. I will share the information i have gathered while i worked with these devices. Development board  If you have been reading some of my earlier posts you will have noticed that in order to work with microcontrollers you will need a development board and a programmer. The development board is similar to what's commonly called an Arduino but in our case with an STM8 in it. The programmer can be purchaed and it required to write all your code into the microcontroller. Below are some example of each The picture below shows a development board that can be purchased easily online. the board is called STM8 Discovery. If you are getting started with STM8 and

Introduction to PIC Microcontrollers Introduction PIC Microcontrollers have been the very first microcontrollers I worked with. I started with the venerable 16F84 and I have worked with a lot of other PIC devices since then. The aim here like my other posts is to give an idea of the implication of working with such devices. So basically what is a PIC Microcontroller, well its another microcontroller available on the market made by Microchip. PIC Microcontrollers are available in a wide variety of offerings namely 8bit, 16 bit or also called DSPIC and 32 bit. Don't get scared here on the number of bits they are actually the size of instruction that the microcontrollers can process. 8bit microcontrollers are out there and performing very complicated tasks. Microchip enhances all their portfolio offerings regularly to make sure their microcontrollers keep up to the job. From a hobbyist point of view there seems to be some models which are very popular mainly the through hole p

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