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Beginner Micro: Electronics Education at its Best
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This site is all about teaching people about electronics. Particularly, embedded microcontroller electronics. Whether you have no background in the subject, your a student, or a skilled pro, we hope to provide a single source for your electronics information.
If you're self taught, you've probably felt the frustration of looking for information all over the web. It's out there but clustered among hundreds if not thousands of web sites. If you have a question, you get stomped on by some clown on a forum who makes you feel silly for asking a question. That's not going to happen here. Our forums are closed to the public and our community is there to help each other. We can all learn from others questions and learn more by trying to answer them in a way that anyone can understand.
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Featured Articles
Timer Talk
After writing about the PIC hardware PWM module it occurred to me that a little more information about the onboard ...
RS232 Interface Module Project
There are times when you want to connect your microcontroller project to a PC. By sending data as serial information ...
LED Tutorial
As I was trying to think of a topic to write on this week, I noticed my ten year old ...
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) using the CCS Compiler
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals in the embedded world are used all the time for a variety of reasons. One ...
Blog
Hello World for your PICKit 2 If you need a little help getting your PicKit 2TM LED’s to blink, here’s a little program that will get you started. You’ll see after you run it that I’ve toggled all 4 of the LED’s in two different sequences. You can play with the different outputs and durations to get familiar with how this is [...]
It’s always helpful to have a list of commonly available capacitors values handy. If you don’t see what you want here, you may have to put a couple caps in parallel to get what you want. Here’s a listing of common capacitor values for polarized, non-polarized, and surfacemount caps.
The majority of devices in the PIC12 and PIC16 Midrange devices use this instruction set. It’s very similar to the 12 Bit PIC Instruction Set but the increased opcode width allows 128 registers and 2048 words of code to be directly addressed.
Here’s the instruction set for Microchip’s Baseline devices. These include the PIC10 series as well as some of the PIC12 and PIC16.
There are three different types of resistor color coding. They vary by providing different information in a different number of color bands. I’ve looked around for a decent chart that I could share and stumbled upon this freeware. It’s provided by moyerelectronics.com. I’ve installed it and played with it and found it to be accurate. Here’s a screenshot [...]
People often want to know how to get started programming PIC’s. Here’s a quick video which introduces you to the PICKit 2 programmer.
News
8-bit Microcontrollers for Medical and Metering Applications Announced by Microchip Technology (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)CHANDLER, Ariz.—-Microchip Technology Inc. , a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, today announced a new four-member family of high-performance 8-bit PIC® microcontrollers for medical and metering applications.
Embedded flash technologies, a foundation of flash MCU growth (EETimes)
Semiconductor Insights has recently finished analyzing embedded flash technologies implemented in flash-MCU’s from seven leading MCU manufacturers: Renesas, Infineon, Fujitsu, ST Micro, Toshiba, Microchip and Atmel. Sponsored Topics: Microchip – Atmel – Infineon Technologies – Multipoint Control Unit – Multimedia
Embedded flash technologies, a foundation of flash MCU growth (EETimes)
Semiconductor Insights has recently finished analyzing embedded flash technologies implemented in flash-MCU’s from seven leading MCU manufacturers: Renesas, Infineon, Fujitsu, ST Micro, Toshiba, Microchip and Atmel.
Despite Problems, Microchip Citations Being Handed Out (KFOX 14 El Paso)
El Paso’s Public Health Department is handing out citations for animals without microchips.
CHANDLER, Ariz.—-Microchip Technology Inc. , a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, today announced its Pure Sine Wave Uninterruptible Power Supply Reference Design, which is based on the dsPIC33F “GS” series of digital-power Digital Signal Controllers .
CHANDLER, Ariz.—-Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, today announced the low-cost, low pin count PIC24F04KA201 family of 16-bit microcontrollers–the latest to feature nanoWatt XLP extreme low power technology.