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)

Chapter 4: Measuring the Amount of Light with a Photoresistor

This chapter focuses on how to connect a photoresistor, an electronic component that measures the amount of light from the environment, to an input port of both the Blue Pill and Curiosity Nano microcontroller boards. In this chapter's exercise, we will analyze with a photoresistor whether a plant receives enough light.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

  • Understanding sensors
  • Introducing photoresistors
  • Connecting a photoresistor to a microcontroller board port
  • Coding the photoresistor values and setting up ports
  • Testing the photoresistor

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned how to connect an analog sensor to a microcontroller board, and how to analyze analog data obtained from a photoresistor. The knowledge and experience learned in this chapter will be useful in other chapters that require the use of a sensor.