Padmal's BLOG

Electronic components are highly sensitive to voltages and currents across them. Most of the devices in the current market work in the voltage levels of 3.3V, 5V, 12V and 15V. If they are provided with a different voltage than the one required by the vendor, they would not function. If the voltage supplied is higher, they might burn off. The PSLab device requires separate voltage levels such as 3.3V and 5V for its operation. There are commercial voltage regulators available in the market designed with advanced feedback techniques and models. But we can create out own voltage regulator. In this blog post, I am going to introduce you to a few basic models capable of regulating voltage to a desired level. Current implementation of PSLab device uses a voltage regulator derived using a zener-resistor combination. This type of regulators have a higher sensitivity to current and their operation may vary when the supplied or the drawn current is lower than the...

MPLab to Program the PSLab   MPLab© X IDE Microchip® is a famous company for PIC® microcontroller manufacturing. This American based company produces a variety of electronic components ranging from basic microcontrollers, EEPROMs, SRAMs, RF devices and many more. In the PSLab device by FossAsia, we use a PIC24EP256GP204 who's data sheet can be found from here . Apart from the high performing micro controllers, Microchip provides a powerful IDE to program these devices. This IDE is based on NetBeans IDE. The programming language is consists of C++ syntaxes and we can embed assembly commands like 'nop' to simplify the code. Documentation and guidelines on how to use this great IDE is available on their official web site . Here we're going to see how to install this in an Ubuntu 16.04 64bit PC. Installing MPLab© X IDE Step I To install this software, first we have to download the tar ball containing the installer. The latest version can be found from the...

2017 - June - 03 What did I do yesterday? After a previous PR of UART.c got merged, there were merge conflicts in every other PR made after that. I tried to resolve them on Github editor but it was getting messy because they are all heavily correlated. So I closed the conflicted PRs to open them again with fixes. Opened up an issue #21 to fix the project tree and made a PR on #22 Reviewed #141 in pslab-android Started separating ADC functions Discussed about the hardware modifications I did on pslab-hardware and made the necessary changes Discussed about navigation views in "Applications" view mock-up What do I plan to do today? I am going to fix all the merge conflicted files and send clean PRs to I2C, SPI, NRF and ADC to fix #14 , #15 , #16 , ...