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 the basics of coding an easy-to-read 20-second counter. This count is recommended by many health authorities for properly washing our hands during that time in an attempt to destroy some viruses such as the one that causes COVID-19. The chapter also explained how the HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor works for activating the counter. One major skill that you gained on completing the project from this chapter is that you learned how to connect a practical LCD to a microcontroller board, and how we could show the counting on an LCD. You can use the LCD in other projects that require showing numeric or text data from a microcontroller board.

We have covered in this chapter a practical way to obtain data from a sensor, process it on the microcontroller board, and do something about it such as showing results on an LCD. Obtaining data from sensors and processing it is one of the main applications of microcontrollers, leveraging their simplicity for connecting...