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)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned what a super-bright LED is and how we can connect it to a microcontroller board. We also reviewed how to use the super-bright LED as a powerful visual alarm, since it glows much more intensely than conventional LEDs. We also summarized what Morse code is, how it is used worldwide, and how to show the SOS Morse code message, which is used in visual alarms as a distress message, by turning on and off the super-bright LED connected to the Blue Pill and Curiosity Nano microcontroller boards. Connecting a super-bright LED is not straightforward, since we will need to know how much current it will draw, because the microcontroller boards' output ports can handle a very limited amount of current, in the order of a few milliamps. This chapter will be beneficial for readers who would like to control an LED in other electronic projects. It also points out the importance of carefully calculating the amps that are drawn by a super-bright LED and using the...