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)

Improving the project performance

I mentioned earlier that we were going to talk about the threshold value. In general, solutions for projects with analog read set the threshold value to 200, but as you remember, we are using a value of 300 to ensure we are reading a clap, not background noise.

If you want to know more precisely the value of your clap's sound, then you can use the example script that the IDE provides us. To access this sketch, we must go to the File menu, then to Examples, and choose Basics. In that section, we will find the AnalogReadSerial sketch, as shown in Figure 7.10:

Figure 7.10 – Analog serial reading example

Figure 7.10 – Analog serial reading example

Selecting that menu option will open the AnalogReadSerial.ino sketch:

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
  int sensorValue = analogRead(0);
  Serial.println(sensorValue);
  delay(1);
}

The previous code introduces an instruction that we have not...