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)

Introducing the DHT11 humidity and temperature sensor module

In this section, we'll review the DHT11 sensor module. This section also describes what the sensor pins are, and how to connect them to a microcontroller board. The DHT11 is an easy-to-use, practical, and low-cost sensor module that measures temperature within a range of 0 to 50 degrees Celsius, with an error rate of +-2%. It also measures environmental relative humidity (RH) within a range of 20% to 90%, with an accuracy of +-5%. These values can change a bit, depending on the sensor module's manufacturers. The next section describes what RH is, an environmental value that is read by the DHT11 sensor.

What is relative humidity?

Relative humidity is based on a combination of water vapor and the temperature of the environment. It is a ratio of the amount of water vapor present in the air at a certain temperature, expressed as a percentage. Generally, the amount of water vapor has a higher RH in cool air than...