Tag Archives: as6

Creating Your First Embedded Project in Atmel Studio

In the last chapter we learned about the development process of embedded systems. We saw what hardware and software tools are required to work with Atmel AVR microcontrollers. We learned about programming languages, compilers and IDEs. In this chapter we will go in the step by step details of using the Atmel Studio IDE to enter and compile a program written in C language. We won ‘t be going in the details of the program. That means what each line means and does. We will simply copy/paste a program as our intention in this chapter is to get familiar with the IDE only. Program will be discussed in latter chapters. You can start Atmel Studio 6 by using its icon from the Windows® Desktop or the Start Menu. Atmel Studio 6 Startup Screen The First screen shown up after the AS5 has started is the Start Page. The start page helps you quickly create a new project or load your previous project without wasting much time. Atmel Studio 6 Home Screen To create a new project we select New Project … option from the Start Page. AS6 will show you the New Project Wizard as shown in the above image. From the project template area (Installed Templates) select C/C++ as the project template. From the project type area select “C […]

Interfacing TCS3200 Colour Sensor with AVR ATmega32

Detecting colour of an object can be an interesting and useful electronic application. It can be realized using a colour sensor like TCS3200 and a general purpose microcontroller like AVR ATmega32. TCS3200 Colour Light to Frequency Converter Chip Fig. TCS3200 Chip .   TCS3200 chip is designed to detect the colour of light incident on it. It has an array of photodiode (a matrix of 8×8, so a total 64 sensors). These photodiodes are covered with three type of filters. Sixteen sensor have RED filter over them thus can measure only the component of red in the incident light. Like wise other sixteen have GREEN filter and sixteen have BLUE filter. As you should know that any visible colour can be broken into three primary colours. So these three type of filtered sensors helps measure the weightage of each of primary colours in incident light. The rest 16 sensors have clear filter. TCS3200 converts the intensity of incident radiation into frequency. The output waveform is a 50% duty cycle square wave. You can use the timer of a MCU to measure period of pulse and thus get the frequency. The output of TCS3200 is available in single line. So you would ask how we get the intensity of RED,GREEN, BLUE and CLEAR channels? Well it has two inputs S2 and […]