Microcontroller and Success : A true Story

At the year of 2008 , I found an advertisement in Appliance magazine about a free kit from a Microcontroller company called Renesas.

I really wanted to get this development kit. It was dedicated to motor control. I registered for this kit but unfortunately it was available only in USA and Canada.

However, my email was added in the company's clients database. Next, the company started a design contest at the same year called Renesas HTS Design Contest 2008.



The company invited me to participate in this design contest. It was a world wide contest which included shipment of free development kit to each eligible participant.

First I was admired by the idea itself of receiving a free development kit for the contest. I wanted to have this kit to learn more about Embedded C programming and to learn the Renesas technology which was new to me until that time.


To be eligible to receive the kit, there was a short demo for the company's other educational boards over a Virtual Lab environment. Then you are asked few questions to qualify for receiving the kit.

I passed through the stages of qualification and waited to receive the kit. When I received it I started to develop my design right away.




The company made a very good idea for improving the challenge through the launch of a forum for the challenge.

Each participant posted the idea of his entry and provided some technical details about it . This idea was very helpful and motivational. Any visitor or another participant can see your posted details and get admired with it or comment on it.





My design was a Multichannel Oscilloscope. The idea was very simple. I made the analog signals read by the analog-to-digital converter of the Microcontroller M16C ( on which the board is based )




The M16C has many A/D inputs but and there were 3 of them available in the challenge board.
The signals values were converted into digital in the Microcontroller and they were sent to a PC based client software which incorporated the display of a virtual Multichannel Oscilloscope.

Virtual Oscilloscope

This is the Renesas HEW program window

From the PC based client, the user can choose the input channel to be displayed on the virtual oscilloscope and the rate at which it is displayed.

Program Control Panel

Before the last day of the deadline of the contest I submitted the source code for the Microcontroller side (written in Embedded C ) and the source code of the PC client (written in Visual Basic.Net) .

The results of the contest were announced on Renesas DevCon 2008.

I've got the 4th honorable mention prize for my entry "Multichannel Oscilloscope".




This contest was very challenging and rewarding. Thanks to Renesas who has helped me through all this contest.


Location for the HTS 2008 projects:

http://renesasrulz.com/design_contest_archives/renesas_2008_hew_target_server_design_contest/m/mediagallery/276.aspx

Here is the location for my project:

http://www.renesasrulz.com/docs/DOC-1290

رابط المقالة باللغة العربية

The link to the post in Arabic

http://arabic-embedded-egypt.blogspot.com.eg/2010/04/renesas.html



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Information Disaster Recovery .

Data Recovery In Egypt

This post is not about Embedded Systems. It is about a problem that many people face it. Many people save their valuable data on their PCs and then something happens. A virus infects the MBR( Master Boot Record ) of the hard disk and all the partitions and data on that PC is not accessible. Or somebody saves his data on partitions other than the system partition but tries to setup Windows on the system partition and makes a mistake and installs Windows on the data partition. When he finds this out, He tries to get his important and valuable data but he can't.



I've seen the two examples happening to many people. When your PC contains some games or songs or some sources for some common programs , then your loss wouldn't be great.


But what if these data were collected and produced over a long period of time ?

And what if these data were precious photos and memories that you cannot get from any where and you didn't make backup for them ?

And what if you have saved your Master or PHD data on this PC without making backup ?

Fortunately, you can recover the data form your hard or flash disk even if they were formatted by mistake or their MBR is corrupted due to a Virus infection or a wrong operating system installation procedure.

Many programs can help you to get you lost data.




I myself have done this many times. Both recovering data form a hard disk which the user has installed Windows on the data partition by mistake and recovered data form a Hard Disk with a totally corrupted MBR .

If you faced this problem some day and don't know where to start from, just give me a call. I am sure I can help.










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Embedded Systems Committee

Well , this is not a technical post. I wanted to share this with all my friends in Egypt . Embedded Systems Committee is a group of Egyptian Embedded Systems Engineers who graduated from ITI intake 27 . They wanted to do something useful to there community . They wanted to share there knowledge with their colleges and Engineering students through this group.




I found about this group and their activities in Egypt on EED '09 , and since then I 've been trying to find their contacts .

Now, I will share this information with you to contact them and you may attend one of their seminars .


This is their group on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18263984084



And this is their Email address :

info@ESCommittee.com

Website :

www.ESCommittee.com



And this is a group I created on Facebook just after I heard about them in EED '09 before I find theirs .

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=info&gid=113460832366#!/group.php?v=wall&gid=113460832366



Finally, I hope you found this post useful.





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PSoC Rocks !!

Cypress PSoC 3 First Touch Starter Kit

I just received the PSoC 3 first touch starter kit. I new about it from the Cypress news letter I receive regularly. This is a free educational kit. It contains many sensors and shipped with sample codes for programs implementing all these sensors.

The contains thermal sensor , proximity sensor , capacitive touch panel , wireless communications module and my favorite sensor 3D accelerometer .

The first application I found as I opened the kit was PSoC Rocks . This is a manually scanned AirText display that is the same as the I made using Microchip PIC 16F84. But this one is a more advanced application that uses the accelerometer in the direction at which the circuit is waved . It uses the POV ( Persistence Of Vision ) .

When the acceleration threshold is reached, the scanned display is started. And it determines the direction of waving so that it doesn't draw the display in the opposite direction. Actually this is the same advancement I thought for my previous application.

I shoot this one myself as I started using the kit

For people who don't know about Cypress and PSoC :

PSoC ( Programmable System on Chip ) is an advanced microcontroller architecture from PSoC which includes some digital and analog modules for simplifying designing Embedded Systems with digital and analog peripherals. Examples of digital modules ( counters , timers , RS-232 , UART , USB .. ) and analog modules ( Programmable Gain Amplifiers , filters ... )

This is the actual kit I received

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16F84 POV AirText

POV (Persistence Of Vision)


This is a post of LEDs project. The project is called POV (Persistence Of Vision). If you are not familiar with this concept, it works as an LED matrix display.

The difference is that POV display consists of one column of LEDs only and is mechanically scanned through space to give the vision of a 2D LED Matrix Display.

Many projects are built in rotating ( circular motion ) or in oscillating layout ( moving left and right) .

I 've seen this project "AirText " based on the Sun Microsystems Sun Spot , then I wanted to make a similar yet more simple project.


There are many Microcontroller projects based on the POV concept. But i think this is the simplest circuit that can do the job with minimum hardware.





The only drawback with this circuit is that it has no sensor for direction of motion. The
Sun Microsystems Sun Spot has a built in motion sensor called accelerometer. Which senses the amplitude and direction of acceleration. So when the module is moved in one direction it draws the scanned characters according to this direction.

But with this simple circuit using PIC16F84, the characters are drawn in one direction independently of the circuit direction of motion.






You can find the source code , Hex file and Proteus 7 design file here.



تستطيع قراءة هذه المقالة بالعربية
You can read this post in Arabic


http://arabic-embedded-egypt.blogspot.com/2010/05/pov-persistence-of-vision.html



Here is the project on my profile at instructables.com

http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-16F84-POV-Message-AirText/





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PIC 16F84 Tetris Video Game

This is an old project that uses the Microcontroller chip PIC16F84 for the famous game Tetris. The output of this circuit is displayed on a TV screen. It also produces sound signals and can be controller by joystick.

I didn't design this circuit nor wrote the software for it , but I found it here and assembled it and found it very interesting. That's why I wanted to share it with my friends.

Here is a screen shot of the game.








And this is the schematic diagram for the circuit.

There is a free Emulator for the Microchip PIC that contains TV screen plug-in for viewing PIC signals that is directed to the TV. I found it here . I also uploaded the file Here.

You can get the project package form here . It contains the schematics , PCB and software .



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