Microcontrollers

Recently I’ve been playing with cheap GY-80 module, more precisely 10DOF module with accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and barometer.  Eventually I’ll write how to use all four of them. I’ll start with accelerometer (accel). This guide could potentially be used for interfacing most of the MEMS accels, and definitely as a guide how to interpret data coming from the accel, not only from MEMS but also how to use the data coming from Smartphone, wiimote etc. They are basically the same thing. However, I won’t be describing features as tap sensing and double tap sensing, this will be only an introduction about the raw accelerometer.

Read More

I and my friend Zenios Agapiou thought of constructing a simple two wheel balancer robot. At the beginning we thought we will just program our Atmega88pa micro-controller through standard JTAG. However, we quickly realized we have Bluetooth connected to the RX/TX device, so we thought whether we can upload Arduino bootloader to the atmega and program it wirelessly.  However it wasn’t that simple as we initially anticipated.

Read More

Most of my projects involves having some sort of communication between PC and my micro. Either useful data is being transmitted between those two, or just for the sake of debugging, since I don't have any of the high end AVR debugging tools. Whatever reason, serial communication is always useful and I view it as a must have and very important module of any micro. In this article I'll be describing how to set up serial communication with XMEGA, also how to use standard printf and scanf functions in your C and C++ code. I won't be explaining what is a USART, I expect you to already be comfortable with the theory behind it and I'll leave out interrupts.

Read More

For me, one of the first things I wanted to test is how to setup the system clock. In this tutorial I'll be explaining how to set up external oscillator from 8-16Mhz and how to set up the xmega to use internal 32MHz clock. I think, by providing instructions for these two types of system clocks, anyone should be able to understand the logic behind the datasheet and set up whichever clock he/she wants.

Read More

For my final year project I ended up experimenting with ATxmega16e5 microcontroller, after major step backs with TI ARM microprocessors (don't get me wrong ARM is very powerful). 
At the first glance these new xmega series uC are quite impressive. 32MHz internal clock, incredibly fast ADC (16e5 can have up to 300ksps), 12 bit adc, DAC, two or more USARTs and list goes on. Moreover you are able to use tools you're familiar with, when it comes to program AVR family micros, providing you have programmed AVR family before. I have yet to test full capabilites of the new xmega series, but I'll write posts about individual modules, like ADC, USART, DAC etc.

Read More