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)

Reading data from a voltage sensor module

It is time to learn how to code a program that will read the information from the voltage sensor and display its reading on the serial monitor.

Let's write the program to receive the sensor data from the STM32 Blue Pill:

  1. Declare which pin of the STM32 Blue Pill card will be used as input of the sensor data:
    const int sensorPin = 0;

    The input pin will be the 0 (labeled A0 on the Blue Pill).

  2. Next, in the setup() part, start the serial data transmission and assign the speed of the transfer to 9600 bps, and indicate to the microcontroller the type of pin assigned to A0:
    void setup() {
      Serial.begin(9600);
      pinMode(sensorPin, INPUT);
    }
  3. Now, in loop(), first read the input pin's data sensor, send its value to the serial port, and wait for a second:
    void loop() {
      int sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
      Serial.print("Voltage: ");
      Serial.println(sensorValue...