RS232 Communication – The Level Conversion

Hello and welcome back. Continuing our discussion on RS232 serial communication in this part we will make a RS232 level converter. In the last tutorial we saw that how RS232 level signals differs from normal logic signals. So to interface RS232 level signals to our MCUs we need a "Level converter". And in this tutorial we will make one. What a level converter will do is to convert RS232 level signals (HIGH=-12V LOW=+12V) from PC to TTL level signal (HIGH=+5V LOW=0V) to be fed to MCU and also the opposite. Fig – Working of RS232 level converter       As RS232 is such a common protocol there is a dedicated IC designed for this purpose of "Level Conversion". This IC is MAX232 from Maxim. By using charge pumps it generates high voltages(12V) and negative voltages(-12V). Now lets make it! Things you need S.No Item Value Qty 1 MAX232 IC 1 2 Capacitors 1uF 4 3 10uF 1 4 DB9 Female Connector 1 5 General Purpose PCB 1 6 Some Wires – –   Fig – Stuffs required for RS232 level converter.     Now having all the stuffs in our working table lets begin. The Schematic Fig – Schematic for RS232 level converter.     Assembly Assemble the circuit according to the schematic on a small piece of general […]

RS232 Communication – The Basics

RS232 is a asynchronous serial communication protocol widely used in computers and digital systems. It is called asynchronous because there is no separate synchronizing clock signal as there are in other serial protocols like SPI and I2C. The protocol is such that it automatically synchronize itself. We can use RS232 to easily create a data link between our MCU based projects and standard PC. Excellent example is a commercial Serial PC mouse (not popular these days, I had got one with my old PC which I bought in year 2000 in those days these were famous). You can make a data loggers that reads analog value(such as temperatures or light using proper sensors) using the ADC and send them to PC where a special program written by you shows the data using nice graphs and charts etc.. actually your imagination is the limit! Basics of Serial Communication. In serial communication the whole data unit, say a byte is transmitted one bit at a time. While in parallel transmission the whole data unit, say a byte (8bits) are transmitted at once. Obviously serial transmission requires a single wire while parallel transfer requires as many wires as there are in our data unit. So parallel transfer is used to transfer data within short range (e.g. inside the computer between graphic card and […]

Using IR remote with AVR MCUs – Part II

Hello Friends, Welcome back. In previous tutorial I introduced my IR remote decoding library. In this tutorial I will continue our discussion and show you how to add IR remote controls support to your AVR projects. Step I Download the library files and unzip them in a folder. Step II In AVR studio create a new AVR-GCC project. Then copy the following files to the project folder. IR remote related. Source Files remote.c Header Files remote.h rckeys.h LCD Related Source Files lcd.c Header Files lcd.h myutils.h Note: Include file from the \lib\ATmega8 if you are using ATmega8 \lib\ATmega16 if you are using ATmega16 or ATmega32 After The files have been copied add them to your project by right clicking project view and selecting “Add Existing Source File(s)…” and then select the “lcd.c”. Similarly add other source files. In the same way add the header files by selecting "Add Existing Header File(s)…" Adding files to projects.   If instead of AVR Studio you use Makefiles then add all the source files names in the source section of the makefile along with your main c file (which has same name as your project and has the main function). Step III. In your main C source file include the following files #include "remote.h" in addition to standard files in your main() function initialize […]

Using IR remote with AVR MCUs

Hi Friends, Welcome to my AVR tutorial Series. In this article I will describe my Infrared Remote Control Library. Hope you will enjoy it. I was very much amazed my remote controls since long. The simple circuits described in magazine were just operated like a switch and can only switch on and off an application. That means only single channel. That was of not much use. What I wanted was access to each key on remote control. I wished I could decode the signals generated by common remotes controls found in our homes. This way I could make multi channel remote controls for any project. So I went on and after some web research, coding and debugging I finally succeeded ! Actually I completed that more than one and half year ago (in may 2007). And now I thought I should also make it available to others who are in need of it so that they can use it in their projects. So I went on to make it more "clean" and also to make it more "easily portable" so that it can be used with different devices operating at different frequency. And now the result is here, a very easy to use library that can add remote control feature in any of your AVR project ! Using a IR […]