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)

Connecting a gas sensor to the STM32 microcontroller board

In this section, we will build a gas sensor device utilizing the STM32 Blue Pill microcontroller board and a gas sensor module using the hardware components listed in the Technical requirements section. The gas sensor breakout board connects to the STM32 Blue Pill with four pins:

  • Analog output (AO): This pin generates an analog signal and must be connected to an analog input of the microcontroller.
  • DO: This pin generates a digital signal and must be connected to a digital input of the microcontroller.
  • VCC: Pin to supply power to the sensor (5 V).
  • GND: Ground connection.

For this project, you will learn how to interface the MQ-2 module with the STM32 board to acquire data in a digital and analog way. Let's start with the digital option.  

Interfacing for digital reading

Now we are going to connect the electronic components to the breadboard, do the wiring, and finally connect everything...