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)

Connecting a photoresistor to a microcontroller board port

This section shows how to connect a photoresistor to the Blue Pill and the Curiosity Nano boards to read the amount of light from an environment (for example, a living room).

In this section, we also explain how to use three LEDs to indicate that a room is well illuminated by turning a green LED on, that the light is dim by turning a yellow LED on, or that it is dark by turning a red LED on. The electronic circuit with the photoresistor sensor can be placed close to a plant and the circuit can be useful to know whether a plant needs more light or not. The next section shows how to build the circuit with the Blue Pill board.

Connecting a photoresistor to a Blue Pill board

The connection of a photoresistor sensor to a Blue Pill microcontroller board is simple. It can be directly connected to an input analog port, provided that you use a pull-down resistor. The circuit shown in Figure 4.4 describes how to do it, and it...