Interfacing Graphical LCD with AVR MCU – Part III

Hello Friends, Welcome Back. This is the continuation of our tutorial series on Graphical LCD Programming. Till now we have made the hardware for testing and setup avr studio project for graphical development. Now as our hardware and software is ready, its time to get our hands dirty by digging deep into ProGFX graphical programming. Introduction The graphical LCD is made up of a grid of pixels. Common resolution is 128×64. That means that their are 64 horizontal lines and each line has 128 pixels. These displays are monochrome that means each pixel can either be ON or OFF. ON pixels looks dark while OFF pixels are nearly invisible. The glcd has a graphic RAM where each bit in ram corresponds to one pixel on screen. You write to the graphic RAM to modify its contents and the screen will change accordingly. The LCD module offers just that much functionality. You can’t do much with that. Pixel Matrix of Graphical LCD You need a graphic library that takes high level commands like Graphic primitives like line,circles, rectangle etc Text Drawing Image/Icon drawing. Double buffering. and changes the graphic memory accordingly. These operation requires some advance algorithms (at least from beginners point of view!). So the graphic library will help you generate complex graphical output very easily. Pixel Addressing The horizontal […]

Interfacing Graphical LCD with AVR MCU – Part II

This tutorial deals with downloading and installing ProGFX graphic engine. ProGFX is a free and easy to use embedded graphic library that can control several display modules and can run on AVR, PIC and ARM MCUs. In this tutorial we will make a ProGFX graphical application with Atmel AVR ATmega32 MCU using AVR Studio and WinAVR (C Compiler). So lets begin. Downloading ProGFX engine. Please download the ProGFX engine from the following link. Download ProGFX v1.0 Installing ProGFX Engine. You need WinZIP to extract the files to your hard disk. Please extract it to root of any drive like "C:". Following Folders will be created. C:\progfx\include C:\progfx\lib Folders Created after extracting the ProGFX package Note that core of the engine is contained in two folders named "include" and "lib" but there may be some others folders too, like "Help" depending on your version of ProGFX engine. Creating a Graphical Project using AVR Studio. The basic tools required for developing with AVRs are Atmel Studio (Integrated development environment with integrated C compiler) eXtreme Burner AVR (to transfer program files to chip) These tools must be installed and set up correctly as described in the following tutorial. Creating "Hello World" project with Atmel AVR. Start AVR Studio and you will be presented with the following screen. Atmel Studio 6 Startup Screen The […]

Interfacing KS0108 based 128×64 Graphical LCD with AVR MCU.

Those how are building microcontroller based project for little long must have got bored with the good old character LCDs. Whether you are bored or your application require to present more data to the user in a better way, you need Graphic LCD. Character LCD Interfacing is quite easy so every one uses it, but when I comes to Graphic LCD you need a well written and powerful graphic library. Its not enough that you read the LCD datasheet and connect it your MCU and start sending data. Because the LCD just appears to be block of memory whose contents are directly visible on screen. The datasheet can only guide you how to access this memory. You just can’t do much by writing to the memory. The graphic library is a piece of software that has complex algorithms to render graphic primitives like line, rectangles, circles, images and more. It also helps load fonts and render text and numbers on screen. So it provide high level access to the LCD screen and applications can be written much more easily. While I was researching for graphic library for the GLCDs, I found some but I was not fully satisfied by any of them. So I began to write a clean, powerful, portable and easy to use library that can handle sever […]

Interfacing MMA7260 Triple Axis Accelerometer with ATmega32 – AVR Tutorial

Accelerometers are recently developed solid state electronics devices that makes it very easy to measure acceleration. They are completely modular and very tiny devices which gives voltage proportional to acceleration. These type are called analog accelerometers as their output is voltage. Some other gives a PWM output or direct binary digital data, they are called digital accelerometers. Accelerometers are used widely in modern devices. Apple iPhone,iPad and Nokia series 60v5 devices for automatic screen orientation changing. Also for motion gaming and other showoff stuff like Xpress Beer in above devices. Portable Hard disk and Notebooks for fall detection. Anti-theft devices. Motion Gaming Consoles like Nintendo Wii. Balancing Robots and UAVs. Experiments which needs to find force, like car crash experiments. And Possibly many other. Accelerometers can measure acceleration in 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional space. They are called 2D and 3D accelerometers respectively. Accelerometers have certain range, i.e. the maximum acceleration they can measure. It is specified in terms of g. ‘g’ is the acceleration due to gravity of earth and it is equal to 9.80665m/s2. Common accelerometers can have a range of 1.5g to 6g. It is obvious that 1.5g accelerometer is more precise than 6g. So use 1.5g where more accuracy is needed while use 6g for much more harsh experiments. Renault R26 can pick up 100km/hr is […]