Category Archives: AVR Tutorials

Displaying Custom Characters on Alphanumeric LCDs

You can use this LCD Custom Char Builder Software to quickly and easily build custom characters for alphanumeric LCD modules. LCD Custom Char Maker A standard alphanumeric LCD module supports eight custom characters. So our software has view for all eight custom chars named from Char 0 to Char7. You can select any char to edit at a time. Select a char to edit … You can use your mouse to draw the character in the large green area as shown above. Holding right mouse button erases the pixel. In the example below we have drawn a "Heart" symbol for custom Char 1. Draw the char using mouse. Now we have completed drawing all the eight custom characters. Draw all 8 characters. Finally HIT Save code to get a custom_char.h file. This header file is compatible with our popular LCD interface library. You just need to copy/paste this header file in your lcd project folder. Then edit the lcd.c (part of our library) to include this file. Outputting a custom char on LCD is fairly easy! Say for example if you need to write. "I ♥ AVR" write the code like this :- LCDWriteString("I %2 AVR"); The %2 will be replaced by the custom Custom Char 2 which is defined as a heart symbol in our header file generated above. […]

Time Input Dialog for Graphic LCD

GUI Frameworks of all modern OS like Windows, Linux (Qt & GTK+), MAC etc have a concept of standard dialogs. For example all applications running under Windows shows the same file open dialog for selecting a file. Similarly their are standard dialogs for folder selection, colour selection, font selection etc. This concept has several advantages, and the most important is a easy user interface. Since the user is already familiar with file selection in one application, he/she can use file open dialog of any application. Building on the same concept our GUI framework for ProGFX (avr glcd driver) will too have many standard dialogs for common user interface. In this tutorial we will build the "Time Input Dialog" that helps programmer ask the user to input time. The time could be anything like :- "On" or "Off" time for a relay in a timer application. Alarm time in an alarm clock application. Period start time in a school bell application. And many others. The programmer just need to call the function. void ShowGetTimeDlg(uint8_t *h,uint8_t *m,uint8_t *s,uint8_t *am_pm) It takes four parameters hour, minutes, second and am_pm. All parameters are passed by reference(pointer actually), this is because the function modifies the value of those variables. It shows a dialog as shown below :- Time Input Dialog The user can use the […]

DS1307 I2C RTCC Interface using SoftI2C lib

In the last tutorial, I explained you how to use our SoftI2C library to read and write a 24CXX series I2C EEPROM. Now I will continue our exploration and write a register access layer for the DS1307 chip. The DS1307 chip is a real time clock and calendar IC. The register access layer that we will develop provides the application programmer with function that reads and write the registers of DS1307. Remember that any piece of hardware appears to the CPU as a set of registers only. DS1307 has :- Seven Registers (from 0x00 to 0x06) that are used for timekeeping functions. One CONTROL register(0x07) for square wave generation setting (we don’t use this for simplicity). 56 bytes of battery backup RAM (from 0x08 to 0x3F) Fig. : A Simple DS1307 RTC Module.   Once the application programmer has access to functions that reads and writes to any register (specified by its address) inside DS1307 ic, he/she can easily get and set the time infos like sec,min,hour, am/pm, date,month,year etc. The register access layer is built over the core Soft I2C layer. The register access layer consists of the following three functions. void DS1307Init(void) { SoftI2CInit(); } /*************************************************** Function To Read Internal Registers of DS1307 ——————————————— address : Address of the register data: value of register is copied to this. […]

24C1024 I2C EEPROM 128KB

24CXX I2C EEPROM Interface using SoftI2C lib

In this tutorial I will show you how to use our easy to use open source Soft I2C library to access a 24C64 EEPROM chip. We discussed the library in our previous tutorial. The functions developed in this tutorial will use services of the I2C library to read and write the EEPROM. The EEPROM access mainly contains only two routines. BOOL EEWriteByte(uint16_t address,uint8_t data); BOOL EEReadByte(uint16_t address ,uint8_t* data); The first one write a 8 bit data to a memory location specified by the variable address, since a EEPROM can have more that 256 bytes of storage that is why the address variable is 16 bit. The second function reads the memory location specified by the variable address and stores the read data in variable data. Both the function return EE_SUCCESS on success and EE_IO_ERROR on failure. How to develop the EEPROM Write function? We open the datasheet of 24C64A (64kbit) EEPROM and try to understand the random read and random write function. The figure 8 on page number 11 clearly describes the write steps. You just need to translate the figure into proper call to our Soft I2C lib API’s. BOOL EEWriteByte(uint16_t address,uint8_t data) { SoftI2CStart(); //SLA+W if(!SoftI2CWriteByte(EEPROM_WRITE_ADDRESS)) { SoftI2CStop(); //I2C i/o error return EE_IO_ERROR; } //Address HIGH if(!SoftI2CWriteByte(address>>8)) { SoftI2CStop(); //I2C i/o error return EE_IO_ERROR; } //Address LOW […]

Software I2C Library for AVR MCUs

Inter IC Communication or I2C is a two wire serial communication bus used to connect a variety of external peripheral with a microcontroller. Most common are EEPROMs, RTC, Port Expanders etc. Most leading MCUs comes with at least one dedicated I2C host adaptor built in. But some times we need more than one I2C interface or we need I2C lines on some other i/o pins than those allotted to the hardware I2C, in that case we need to go with a solution called SoftI2C. In SoftI2C the I2C signals are handled in software, the advantage is that any two i/o line of the MCU can be used for communication. The drawback is that it need more CPU cycles are wasted in generating the signal thus less time slice is available to the application. In this article we will present our open source, flexible and easy to use SoftI2C library. This library can be used to connect any I2C slave device with an AVR (and latter PIC MCU) MCU. Some limitations of the library are :- No Multimaster support. No clock stretching support. But you can connect multiple number of I2C Slaves on the same bus. I2C Master/Slave Connection The Soft I2C Library for AVR The soft I2C library for AVR comes in two files. i2csoft.c i2csoft.h The configuration section lets […]

Analog Clock on GLCD – Drawing the Face

Hello friends, In the previous tutorials of graphical lcd, we have learnt about the basic primitive and custom design functions. So drawing an analog clock on graphical lcd is a bit more advanced project. So it’s really exciting to do this project and for this we have to use a simple mathematical calculation and some programming techniques. A GLCD Clock using ATmega32   Introduction: Before going to clock design, we have to first understand its fundamentals. A clock has three hands i.e. hour, minute and second. For each hand, we have to include separate calculations but we have to also take care about the dependency of one hand upon another. That we will discuss in the later tutorials. For user’s simplicity, we have already designed a library including all functions suitable at user level. Now we will discuss the basic concept of the calculation of positioning the hands in a clock according to user level input.   showing the layout of a clock on graphical lcd Explaining the Calculation part: As previously mentioned, there is some mathematical and trigonometric calculation involved which will decide the position of the three hands on the clock according the user level input. So basically we have to decide the coordinate of the hands so that we will draw them properly. Lets come to some […]

Using Shift Registers with AVR Micro – AVR Tutorial

Today I am going to explain a helpful technique used while designing embedded system. The technique is to expand the number of input and output lines available in any microcontroller. The idea is to use a shift register, a shift register help us load data in a serial fashion (requiring less number of i/o lines) and then convert the data into a parallel form that can drive many types of load like LED,Relays, motor etc, just like normal i/o ports of MCU. Their are two advantage of this method:- Only three i/o lines can drive virtually any number of output ports. Say if you want to control 50 leds that are at the distance of 2 meter from the controller then you save lots of wires! and mess up too! The above described what we called an output shift register. Another type is an input shift register. This type is used to take input. It does reverse of the output shift register. It takes parallel input and transfer it serially to the MCU. The most common commercial example I found is the NES joystick. Their are 8 buttons (you will notice 10 but 2 of it are turbo, that means they repeat action A or B(turbo A or B pressed) at particular frequency when kept depressed) The designers didn’t ran […]

Stepper Motor Control – AVR Tutorial

Stepper motors pairs nicely with a smart device like a microcontroller to create precise digitally controlled movements that has made possible many of modern gizmos around us. For example a printer, scanner, plotters, fax, floppy drive (not so modern though!), automatic industrial machines like CNC (Computer numerically controlled) drills, laser shows etc. Though to a naked eye the motor of stepper look no other than a DC motor but the difference is that each step of a stepper motor is in control. For example a high speed desktop printer when the paper moves forward, to a novice it seems like a motor is just pushing the paper out but in reality the control board inside the printer request the motor to move the paper exactly same amount that has been printed. This precise movement keeps the next printed pixel in alignment with previously printed pixels. The thing is that the stepper motors have certain amount of steps per full 360 degree rotation (exact number depends on model) the controller can request the stepper to rotate any number of steps. For example if you are making a robot, you want it to move exactly as per your program. Like if you say go forward 100cm then rotate right 45 degrees and move forward 50 cm. You cannot do this with DC […]

Digital Humidity Sensor

Digital Humidity sensors are of great help in maintaining suitable environmental condition in places such as ware houses, green houses, factories, smart homes etc. They are also very easy to interface with MCU and PC. When coupled with a PC or Microcontroller they can be used in wide variety of smart automation. One such sensor I will present today is a serial humidity sensor. The interface is very simple. The communication is done over a standard asynchronous serial line. The interface parameters are as follows. UART 9600 bps. Start bit: 1 Stop bit: 1 Parity Bit : 0 (No parity bit) No Flow Control. Fig.: Serial Humidity Sensor.   Command Set All commands are begin by "$sure" followed by space (ascii 32) All UART Command are in ASCII Commands are NOT case sensitive. All commands ends with a CR LF pair (ascii \r\n in C language). Get Current Temperature in Degree Centigrade Command : $sure temp -c Returns: XXXCentigrade Where XXX is current temperature. Example in C UWriteString("$sure temp -c\r\n"); Get Current Temperature in Degree Fahrenheit Command : $sure temp -f Returns: XXXFahrenheit Where XXX is current temperature. Example in C UWriteString("$sure temp -f\r\n"); Get Current Humidity Command : $sure humidity Returns: XXX%RH Where XXX is current relative humidity. Example in C UWriteString("$sure humidity\r\n"); Get Current Status Command : $sure […]

AVR Graphic LCD and Accelerometer Demo

Hello All!, Accelerometer applications are hot these days. So today I will show you how you can easily make a accelerometer add on for your AVR GLCD Board. Once you make this you can plug it into the AVR GLCD Board any time you wish to run a accelerometer based application on it. I will also provide a simple Open Source App for the AVR GLCD Board that can be used to test the accelerometer in no time. Developers can use this demo as a base for any accelerometer based app. Things you will need are A Veroboard or general purpose prototyping PCB (dotted one, not the line one). Female Burg Strips Female Burg Strip R/A MMA7260 Accelerometer Board Fig.: A Veroboard Marked for Cutting   Fig.: Veroboard Cut to Size   Fig.: Burg Strip Female   Fig.: Burg Strip Female Soldered to Veroboard.   Fig.: Burg Strip Female Soldered to Veroboard.   Fig.: 5 PIN Burg Strip Female Right Angle   Fig.: R/A Burg Strip Soldered.   Fig.: Just Ready!   Fig.: AVR GLD Dev Board   Fig.: Accelerometer Expansion Board Connected   Fig.: Accelerometer Connected.   Fig.: Accelerometer Connected with AVR GLCD Board   Fig.: AVR Accelerometer Ready! Connections     CONNECT TO GND Ground Supply Ground (EXP Port) VDD 3.3 V OUT SLEEP Sel2 G Select Pin2 […]

Handling Text and Fonts in Graphic LCD

ProGFX supports advance function to draw text on graphical LCD screen. ProGFX support multiple fonts, fonts with variable width characters, absolute pixel based positioning, and utility function to get the dimension of text in any specified font. The last feature is used to cleanly position text relative to other graphic and text objects on screen. So lets get started. First you will need a tool that will help convert any Windows Font to ProGFX compatible format. Thanks to Mr. F. Maximilian Thiele we have a great tool called Font Creator. You can download it from here. Download GLCD Font Creator It is a Java application so you need the Java Runtime to use it. Launch the app using start.bat file. You will get a screen similar to this. Font Creator Main Screen From file menu select "New Font" , and configure the New Font Dialog as follows. New Font Dialog Name = Arial12 Import Font = Arial Size =12 And click ok. From Export Menu Select "Export Font", Give it the name "Arial12.h" while saving. Create a Atmel Studio Project with GFX Support. The steps are given in the following tutorials. Hello World Project with Atmel Studio 6. Setting up ProGFX Project using AVR Studio. Name the AVR Studio Project as "FontDemo". Open the project folder in Windows Explorer (or […]