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)

Testing out the photoresistor

This section focuses on how to test out a photoresistor to see if it is working OK. First of all, remember that the photoresistor used in this chapter does not have polarity, so you can safely connect any of its pins (legs) to a microcontroller board's input port.

You also need to make sure that the pull-down resistor connected to the photoresistor has the right value. For example, the pull-down resistor used in the Blue Pill example from Figure 4.4 is 10K ohm, and we used a 220-ohm resistor for the Curiosity Nano example from Figure 4.6. We found those resistor values experimentally. You can try out different resistors connected to the photoresistor to see if the voltage passing through the photoresistor changes widely. Ideally, that voltage should be changing between 0 and 3.3 volts, or close to those values, because in our circuit examples from this chapter, we connected one pin of the photoresistor to 3.3 volts.

In order to see if the photoresistor...