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)

Technical requirements

The software that we will use in this chapter is the Arduino and MPLAB X IDEs for programming the Blue Pill and the Curiosity Nano, respectively. Their installation process was described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Microcontrollers and Microcontroller Boards. We will also use the same code examples that were used in the aforementioned chapter.

In this chapter, we will also use the following hardware:

  • A solderless breadboard.
  • The Blue Pill and Curiosity Nano microcontroller boards.
  • A micro USB cable for connecting your microcontroller boards to a computer.
  • The ST-LINK/V2 electronic interface needed to upload the compiled code to the Blue Pill. Remember that the ST-Link/V2 requires four female-to-female DuPont wires.

These are fundamental hardware components that will suffice for the examples described in this chapter, and will also prove useful in other more complex projects explained in other chapters.

The code used in this chapter can be found at the book's GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/DIY-Microcontroller-Projects-for-Hobbyists/tree/master/Chapter02

The Code in Action video for this chapter can be found here: https://bit.ly/3xwFvPA

The next section explains a concise introduction to the C programming language.