Tag: Microcontrollers
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How to Interface LCD Display to a Microcontroller
LCD crystal displays allow a better user interface compared with LED displays as it is much easier to display text messages in LCD displays. They also consume much less power than LED displays. Nonetheless, LED displays have better intensity than LCD displays LCD displays are available usually in 8 x 2, 16 x 2, 20…
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Computer Memory Organization
A computer system uses memory elements for storing program instructions, data, and other information. From the perspective of the instruction set, a memory is an array of words, each identified by a unique address that indicates its location within the memory. In other words, each memory location is assigned a unique address that identifies a…
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Interfacing LEDs & Electromechanical Relays to Microcontrollers
In this article, we briefly describe how to interface LEDs and electromechanical relays to microcontrollers. Note, a detailed description on how this is done can be found in the official documentation of the microcontroller you are working with. Here, we only look at the fundamentals on how this is done. Interfacing LEDs with Microcontrollers The…
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The Intel 8085 Microprocessor
The 8085 Microprocessor is one of the most popular microprocessors. In this article we look at some of the basic features and pin-out configuration of this microprocessor. The block diagram of the 8085 microprocessor is shown below: 8085 Microprocessor Registers The 8085 microprocessor registers include an 8-bit accumulator, an 8-bit flag register (five 1-bit flags,…
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Device Programmers for PIC Microcontrollers
Once the program is written and translated into executable code, the resulting HEX file is loaded to the target microcontroller’s program memory with the aid of a device programmer. The type of device programmer depends on the type microcontroller to be programmed. For instance, some device programmers can only program PIC16 series, whereas some can…
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4 Types of Processor Architectures
Processor architecture can be classified as one of the following four architectures: Accumulator-Based Processor Architecture In the accumulator-based processor architecture, illustrated above, instructions begin and end in accumulators (Acc A and Acc B), which are specially designated registers. In a typical operation, one of the operands is found in the accumulator and the other is…
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How Special Function Registers (SFRs) are Mapped into Memory Space
There are two basic primary architectures used for mapping special function registers into memory space. In the first type of arrangement, I/O space and memory space are separated as illustrated in Figure 1.0. The I/O devices have a separate address space, which is accomplished by either an extra I/O pin on the CPU physical interface…
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Basic Features of a Microprocessor-Based System
The microprocessor is the heart of a microcomputer system and can be described as a programmable device that accepts binary data from an input device; then processes the data according to the instructions stored in the memory and provides results as output. That is to say, the microprocessor executes the program stored in the memory…