[...]... requirements to understand it—excepting your power of logic, naturally If you have an advanced level of hardware, firmware, and software design, you do not necessarily need to experiment with the firmware and software routines presented, and you could use this book only as reference for your future design work However, if it is your intention to study seriously and to experiment with all schematics and programs... aware hardware, firmware, and software design work could be quite expensive to deal with, and you should expect to invest something into acquiring the knowledge This book is based on Microchip controllers, because that is still the cheapest and simplest technology available to start professional hardware and firmware design For software design, Visual Basic 6 compiler is also one of the cheapest and. .. rather expensive for a learning aid We will calculate its approximate costs when studying the BOM (Bill of Materials) Fact is, LHFSD-HCK is mandatory to experiment with all firmware and software programs presented Sure, as I mentioned, if you do have some experience or a very LHFSD REQUIREMENTS Page - 12 - strong logic, you do not necessarily need to experiment with the firmware and software routines I... next If you decide to build yourself the LHFSD-HCK (Hardware Companion Kit), to test all firmware routines and software programs, you need to procure few electronic components, and then the software compilers Let’s see what it takes to bring into factual reality all designs in this book For Hardware Design you need, first of all, a Schematic and PCB Editor, and there are many interesting options for that... dedicated to the LHFSD book You will find there software updates for all source code in this book, and information regarding the future, possible, LHFSD-HCK kit Now, even if you are going to buy your LHFSD-HCK from Corollary Theorems, you still need to study hardware design very well, because hardware and firmware are strongly related together Firmware Design requires that you buy the MPLAB ICD2 tool... CONTENTS Page - 16 - H8.1 Analog to Decimal Conversion - ADC 77 H8.2 Analog Inputs 80 CHAPTER H9: THE BARGRAPH AND THE SEVEN-SEGMENTS DISPLAY MODULES 84 H9.1 The Bargraph Module 85 H9.2 The Seven-Segments Led Display Module 89 CHAPTER H10: STEPPER MOTORS DRIVER MODULE 93 10.1 Stepper Motors 93 10.2 Stepper Driver Module 94 CHAPTER H11: PCB DESIGN 99 H11.1 PCB Design 99 H11.2 The Bill of Materials - BOM 102... into controller’s memory Please be aware hardware, firmware, and software designers use an incredible variety of colorful expressions There are many System Registers inside a microcontroller, and those firmware programmers who use Assembler must study them and the “Memory Allocation Structure” carefully, because they actually load manually those Registers, and then they move data around step by step,... communications protocols, such as RS488 for example 12 VDD and VSS are Positive and Ground supply for the DC logic voltage VREF+ and VREF- are Analog Positive and Negative Voltage Reference, and we are not going to use them The Analog Voltage supply is AVDD and AVSS Because we have only few analog Inputs, the AVDD and AVSS pins are simply connected to VDD and VSS, in our case However, it is recommended to... tasks based on a clock pulse, and a firmware program The terms “microcontroller” and “microprocessor” refer to the same thing The difference between the two is, a microcontroller is—generally, and not necessarily—a simpler microprocessor, usually built with 8 or 16 bits data registers and Data Bus width, and it has lower CPU speeds CPU stands for Central Processing Unit and it is the electronic, digital... also result in the so-called “DC logic voltage levels” The most common DC logic voltages levels are 0 V for a logic 0, and +5 V for a logic 1, but they could be any other DC voltage levels say, -1 5 V for logic 0, and +15 V for logic 1 Microcontrollers are permanently built faster and smaller, and the DC logic voltage levels also tend to become lower, like 0 V and +3 V, or even 0 V and +1.5 V, in order . http://www.corollarytheorems.com/ ————————— LEARN HARDWARE FIRMWARE AND SOFTWARE DESIGN ISBN 0-9 73567 8-7 -2 Copyright © O G POPA. Edition compiled by O G POPA. All rights reserved. No parts of this. LEARN HARDWARE FIRMWARE AND SOFTWARE DESIGN ISBN 0-9 73567 8-7 -2 © O G POPA format “Business Card” CDR first published May 02, 2005 Previously published in “Download eBook” format ISBN 0-9 73567 8-5 -6 . it possible to learn hardware, firmware, and software design in a single, and not very thick book?” My answer is “Yes”, plain and simple, and I will explain why. Both you and I know very