Many of today’s designs use low-cost microcontrollers from Freescale and Microchip, but during the last decade, device packages have resorted to ever-smaller footprints featuring as few as eight or ...

Eight-pin microcontrollers offer numerous peripheral features. However, the maximum number of I/O pins available is often limited to six, since two pins would be required for the chip's power supply.

Here’s an interesting article about reading data from shift registers using less than three pins. 74HC165 shift registers are a popular choice for adding inputs to a microcontroller. They have a ...

There is one thing that unites almost every computer and logic circuit commonly used in the hardware hacking and experimentation arena. No matter what its age, speed, or internal configuration, ...

In most keypads, pressing a key closes a contact that bridges two lines in an xy matrix. If you use a microcontroller to detect a key closure, checking the states of (x+y) lines requires an equal ...

For years, there has been a clear distinction between the Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards. There are some things the Arduino can do that the Raspberry Pi can't, and vice versa. When you think of ...

The size of a circuit can be significantly reduced. This is because programming replaces physical components. They can be reprogrammed many times. This allows changes to be made without replacing ...