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MAX7219 is a common cathode display driver with a simple serial interfaces that can be easily connected to a microcontroller. Among other useful features this IC has built in brightness control and scan control capability that allows to limit the ...

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 ...

Recently I was asked to build an aquarium lighting controller prototype to provide variable brightness during its operation and ability to program  ON/OFF times. 25 blue and white diffused 10mm LED were used to illuminate the aquarium. The main requirement from ...

In this post I’ll show how to build a basic kinetic watch winder using PIC microcontroller and stepper motor. Kinetic watches do not require changing the battery as frequently as in quartz watch however despite their many advantages they have ...

A simple bargraph voltmeter can be built using 2x16 LCD or compatible VFD display. For Arduino version click here. This design utilizes PIC16F877 microcontroller and its ADC block to convert 0 – 5V input voltage to a binary number shown ...

Here is a modified and improved electronic lock design. For Arduino version click here.It is largely based on Digital Lock article, however this time a real electronic lock was used instead of a solenoid. The code is a 4 digit number ...

In this post we’ll review a simple interface for PCF8574 I2C 8-bit IO expander IC and PIC microcontroller. For similar Arduino based implementation click this link. The format of present post is similar to 2 recently published tutorials about I2C ...

This is an update to a recent post on a subject of building a Digitally Controlled Power Supply. In part 1 a basic configuration was presented. In this version a numbers of modifications were made to software/hardware to produce a more advanced ...

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 ...

In this post we’ll add a serial data transfer capability to a standard 7-Segment LED Display by using PCF8574 I/O Port expander IC with I2C interface.For similar design based on Arduino see this link. Usually in order to minimize required ...