Measuring current is a relatively simple task that can be done by connecting a shunt resistor in series with the load and measuring the voltage on this resistor. The voltage is proportional to a load current according to Ohm’s law ...

Vacuum fluorescent display can be a good alternative to a Liquid-crystal displays in some applications. They have a number of advantages over LCD like extended temperature range and excellent contrast in high brightness environment. The main disadvantage is higher power consumption ...

8x8 LED Matrix chaser based on Arduino MEGA compatible board will be presented in this post. It uses a LED dot matrix display module with two 74HC595 shift register chips connected in serial to control the LED output. Similar design ...

LED Battery Level Indicator can be built using Arduino UNO board and 10 LEDs. Similar design that uses 2x16 LCD display can be found at this link. RGB LED variant is here. For Raspberry Pi version click here. I/O lines ...

This very simple design shows how to make a blinking LED using PIC16F684 MCU. In my previous post I’ve used PIC16F877/86 however most of basic circuits do not require a lot of I/O pins and PIC16F684 small 14 pin package is more ...

Raspberry Pi I/O capabilities can be expanded by adding one or cascading a number of shift registers. In this design 74HC595 example is shown. 74HC595 is a very popular and relatively cheap IC. There are assembled modules based on this ...

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is very common technique for controlling cooling fan speed in Desktop PC. In this project PIC16F877A based Pulse Width Modulation  controller was built and tested with 2 fans. 80 mm Coolink SWiF2-80P PWM Fan and Arctic Cooling ...

A simple light sensor can be built using a photoresistor and Arduino UNO board. Similar design is available here. This design requires only a few additional components like 10k resistor and a 10k potentiometer to adjust the light intensity level ...

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 ...

For this project two PIC16F877 MCU's were used, see project schematics below. Slave PIC runs  LEDs decoding and multiplexing code on data received from Master. 7-Segment inputs connected to PORTC,B and common digits anodes to PORTB,A via 2N3906 collectors for ...