Book Image

DIY Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists

By : Miguel Angel Garcia-Ruiz, Pedro Cesar Santana Mancilla
Book Image

DIY Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists

By: Miguel Angel Garcia-Ruiz, Pedro Cesar Santana Mancilla

Overview of this book

We live in a world surrounded by electronic devices, and microcontrollers are the brains of these devices. Microcontroller programming is an essential skill in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), and this book helps you to get up to speed with it by working through projects for designing and developing embedded apps with microcontroller boards. DIY Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists are filled with microcontroller programming C and C++ language constructs. You'll discover how to use the Blue Pill (containing a type of STM32 microcontroller) and Curiosity Nano (containing a type of PIC microcontroller) boards for executing your projects as PIC is a beginner-level board and STM-32 is an ARM Cortex-based board. Later, you'll explore the fundamentals of digital electronics and microcontroller board programming. The book uses examples such as measuring humidity and temperature in an environment to help you gain hands-on project experience. You'll build on your knowledge as you create IoT projects by applying more complex sensors. Finally, you'll find out how to plan for a microcontroller-based project and troubleshoot it. By the end of this book, you'll have developed a firm foundation in electronics and practical PIC and STM32 microcontroller programming and interfacing, adding valuable skills to your professional portfolio.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Testing out the push button

In this section, we will focus on testing a push button. Before using it with a microcontroller board, it's a good idea to try it out to see if it works mechanically, and testing allows us to find out if the push button is normally closed or normally opened. The following image shows how to connect all the components to try out the push button:

Figure 3.10 – Connecting the push button to an LED and a battery pack

Figure 3.10 – Connecting the push button to an LED and a battery pack

As you can see, we don't need to connect a push button to a microcontroller board to test it. Here are the steps for connecting the components and testing the push button:

  1. Connect the batteries' positive (+) terminal to one pin of the push button.
  2. Connect the other push button pin to the 220-ohm resistor.
  3. Connect the 220-ohm resistor to the LED's anode pin.
  4. Connect the LED's cathode pin to the batteries' negative (-) terminal. Be careful when connecting the LED...