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, you learned the basics of connecting an IR temperature sensor to a microcontroller board using the I2C serial data transmission protocol. As you could see, the I2C bus is an important part of the IR thermometer that we built in this chapter. This IR thermometer can be effective for checking human body temperature, like a regular thermometer will do. Since the temperature measurement is contactless, this can prevent the human body from touching the sensor and thus avoiding spreading viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.

This touchless thermometer may help to check whether a person has a fever and thus determine (along with other measurements) whether the person has contracted COVID-19. However, the IR temperature measurements explained in this chapter should not be definitive data to determine whether a person has COVID-19.

The next chapter explains another COVID-19-related project about measuring the recommended 2-meter distance between two people using an ultrasonic...