Solar Tracking System

Solar Tracking System Featured Image

This post is about designing a simple PIC microcontroller based Solar Tracking system. It requires some basic electronics skills and good motor coordination. This design uses 2 unipolar stepper motors and 4 IR-850nm LEDs as sensors to follow the sun  in effort to maximize solar energy received by solar panel. The entire prototype frame was … Read more

PIC16F Development Board

PIC Development Board Featured Image

In this post I’ll show a more general approach for circuits prototyping. Instead of building each individual design to validate its operation why not to design a basic PIC16F877A based Development Board. Current design have all the necessary features of a simple board, including 10 Segment LED bar graph, 2X16 LCD Display and a 3×4 … Read more

Electric Strike Power Reduction

In this post I’d like to show you a very simple way to reduce the power requirements of electric strike that was used in Electronic Lock project. It doesn’t require any modification of the existing hardware/software contrary to PWM and can be implemented by using widely available and cheap modules. The idea behind this circuits is simple. … Read more

Arduino 4 Digit LED 7-Segment Countdown Timer

Arduino-4-Digit-LED-7-Segment-Countdown-Timer-Featured-Image

Arduino 4 Digit LED 7-Segment Countdown Timer based on Arduino MEGA will be shown in this post.  For LCD version of this design follow this link. Similar project that uses PIC16F876 MCU can be found at this link. Raspberry Pi version is also available here. Countdown timer will accept 4-digit initial value from 4×3 membrane … Read more

7-Segment LED Display PCF8574 I2C Arduino

7-Segment-LED-Display-PCF8574-I2C-Arduino-Featured-Image

Adding a serial data transfer capability to a 7-Segment LED Display can be done by using PCF8574 I/O Port expander with I2C interface. Arduino UNO controls the PCF8574 by sending display codes for each segment. Similar circuit based on PIC16F876 micro-controller can be found at this link. In this design common cathode display was chosen together … Read more