Tuesday, March 27, 2018

LC75824 LCD driver chip library for EFM8 microcontrollers

LC75824 is an LCD driver chip. It has 4 commons so it has 1/4 duty and supports 1/2 and 1/3 bias voltages. In addition to being able to directly drive up to 204 LCD segments, the LC75824E and LC75824W can also control up to 12 general-purpose output ports. Serial data input supports CCB format communication with the system controller.
The interface between the LCD driver and the microcontroller is done by using only 3 pins (CLK, CE and DATA).
I know this is an old and rare LCD driver but the library code can be used to adapt other LCD drivers. I use this because I have a broken Samsung MM-N7 audio system with a good display using this IC.

LC75824 pinout
LC75824 pinout

Sunday, March 4, 2018

UART library for EFM8BB1 Busy Bee microcontrollers


This UART library is made for EFM8 microcontrollers. It uses circular buffers for transmission and reception of data. This way large amounts of data can be sent or received with only 5 or 10 bytes per buffer, thus saving memory.
Uses 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity. Supported baud rates: 9600, 14400, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, 128000, 256000.



On EFM8BB10F8G-A device, the UART pins are on port 0 and pin 4 is TX and pin 5 is used for RX.

EFM8BB1 SOIC16 pinout

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Eagle CAD Quick Tip | How to remove unwanted copper pour

Beautify your PCB with this quick tip. A short video on how to remove unwanted copper pour around some traces in Eagle CAD without increasing the clearance between tracks.



Friday, March 2, 2018

Cheap and powerful 50 cents microcontroller | EFM8 Family

This is a step-by-step tutorial on how to setup and program an EFM8BB10F8G-A microcontroller or any other EFM8 Busy Bee microcontroller family from Silicon Labs. It is assumed that the reader knows the C programming language and basics about microcontrollers.
EFM8 Busy Bee microcontroller family from Silicon Labs
Why would you want to learn to use another microcontroller when there are many tutorials and libraries on popular MCU's such as AVR and PIC? Well, because they are much more cheaper but performant nonetheless - on Farnell you can buy them for less than 50 cents - and also are pre-programed with a bootloader making easy to program them using any USB to serial converter.  Compare that to Attiny13A which is around the same price but with half the pin count, less speed and peripherals. Just see the features bellow.