The past week or so has been busy at work and at home (what’s new?) but I’ve managed to squeeze in a few moments here and there to start studying AVR microcontrollers. For my non-technical readers out there, a microcontroller is like an entire computer on a single chip. Modern computers use lots and lots of specialized chips to store information, manipulate it, and move it around from one place to another. A microcontroller has all of that crap on a single chip.

Microcontrollers allow you to stick intelligent logic in a tiny package, and put that tiny package in your device or circuit to help control what’s going on. You have a microcontroller in your microwave: it waits for you to press buttons, figures out that when you press 2-0-0-start you want to run the microwave for two minutes, and then starts cooking your hot pockets. There is a microcontroller in your car connected to your gas pedal, your fuel injectors, and your oxygen sensors. It monitors the oxygen sensors to see how well the fuel in your car is burning and adjusts the fuel injectors to compensate for different temperature and fuel conditions.

There are many many brands of microcontrollers each pumping out a dizzying array of product lines. I’m sticking with the AVR family of microcontrollers for the moment because they have a fairly consistent programming model from chip to chip, and the internal programming language has a number of really nice features (FMUL! On an 8 bit chip!). Also, I like the features of the chips themselves; the larger chips have multiple channels of ADC, PWM lines, and several 8 and 16 bit timers.

Now, because it is a chip, when you interface with it it’s not like plugging a USB cable in; you have to worry about voltages and current and stuff like that. I’m a little rusty on my math skills and Ohms’ law, so I’ve been brushing up on those too. All that to say that you might see a change in focus from photography to circuits around here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 7:27 am and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.