Interfacing DS1307 RTC Chip with AVR Microcontroller

Real Time Clocks, as the name suggests are clock modules. They are available as integrated circuits (ICs) and manages timing like a clock. Some RTC ICs also manages date like a calendar. The main advantage is that they have a system of battery backup which keeps the clock/ca lender running even in case of power failure. A very small current is required for keeping the RTC alive. This in most case is provided by a miniature 3v lithium coin cell. So even if the embedded system with RTC is powered off the RTC module is up and running by the backup cell. This same technique is used in PC timing also. If you have opened your computer case you will notice a small coin cell in the mother board. In this tutorial we will learn to use a very famous RTC IC named DS1307. The DS1307 is described in the datasheet as follows The DS1307 is a low-power clock/calendar with 56 bytes of battery-backed SRAM. The clock/calendar provides seconds, minutes, hours, day, date, month, and year information. The date at the end of the month is automatically adjusted for months with fewer than 31 days, including corrections for leap year. The DS1307 operates as a slave device on the I2C bus. So the aim of the project will be to […]

Interfacing LCD Modules with PIC Microcontrollers.

A large number of embedded project require some type of user interface. This includes displaying numerical, textual and graphical data to user. For very simple numerical display we can use 7 segment displays. If the requirement is little more than that, like displaying some alphanumeric text, we can use LCD Modules. They are cheap enough to be used in low cost projects. They come in various sizes for different requirement. A very popular one is 16×2 model. It can display 2 lines of 16 characters. Other models are 16×4,20×4, 8×1,8×2 etc. In this tutorial we will learn how we can use such modules with Microchip PIC Microcontrollers. Here I will present my LCD library which you can use to create LCD based application/projects quickly. For demo I will use PIC18F4520 Microcontroller but you can use any PIC18 MCU. But you have to calculate the CONFIG values for correct setting and CPU clock selection etc. That means the chip should be configured correctly. See datasheet for more info on CONFIG bytes. MPLAB Project Creation First create a MPLAB project as described in this tutorial. Name the project LCD. Also add a main file called "lcd_test.c". To use my LCD library you need to add it to your project. Just copy/paste the following files to your project folder. Header Files lcd.h myutils.h […]