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
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
In this post I’ll show you how two QDSP-L149 5×7 dot matrix LED Displays can be used to create a 4 Digit display module. The trick is to change the roles of rows and columns. So now each 5×7 Dot Matrix display can show 2 digits instead of only one. Any other similar 5×7 Dot … Read more
This article shows a basic interface between PIC16F microcontroller and a unipolar stepping motor using an assembly code. For programming the MCU you’ll need PICKIT2 or PICKIT3 device. Similar design for Arduino platform can be found at this link. Instead of using a dedicated motor driver IC like a very popular L293D ULN2003A was used. … Read more
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 current amplification. A generic 0.56” Blue Common Anode LED display were used but any other … Read more