Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

max233, 16F628, and RS232

Status
Not open for further replies.

MathGeek

New Member
What my project is going to be is like this:
**broken link removed**

It is basically controlling a toy RC car with a computer. The person uses AVR microcontroller and some program he has written himself. I would like to learn the process so that I can write program in VB and use PIC 16F628 instead. Also, I would like to use max233 instead of max232.

So basically, there is a computer interface. computer sends signal through RS232. max233 does something to the data, and 16f628 receives the data. Then, the microcontroller processes the data, puts one Pin "high," which turns on the controller.

Note that in that project, all the microcontroller does is just put "high" or "low" outputs to switch on/off the transistor. Eventually, i would like to do more advanced stuff like controlling servo, stepper motors.

I need some sort of dummy's guide for complete beginner on this subject. I searched the forum and read some books, but it seems that almost all of them assume that you know something advanced about UART and all that. If you can walk me through this, that is great too.

Thanks.
 
skip the max232 and the microcontroller ... you dont need any of that to control an rc car with a computer

build yourself an isolated parallel port break-out (basically just wire up your parallel port pins to opto-isolators)

this gives you at least 8 and as many as 14(?) data-lines ... using a free library + visual basic will have you switching the bits on your parallel port in no time.

this page has it all summed up quite nicely:
https://www.epanorama.net/circuits/parallel_output.html
 
thanks for the info. I will read the webpage you linked.

I would still like to know more about max233 and microcontroller (USART stuff) because they have other applications also.

Thanks again.
 
Nigel Goodwin said:
Less wires, and easier to control.

please define "easier to control"

if the objective is to operate 4 (or more) switches in an on/off manner, how is piling on the additonal layer of a serial interfaced microcontroller "easier" than just controlling the switches directly with the computer?
 
justDIY said:
please define "easier to control"

if the objective is to operate 4 (or more) switches in an on/off manner, how is piling on the additonal layer of a serial interfaced microcontroller "easier" than just controlling the switches directly with the computer?

Because any modern OS doesn't allow direct hardware access, but you can easy access the serial port!.
 
MathGeek said:
Is it possible to switch on/off the SERIAL port like parallel port?

Yes, it's how programmers like the JDM work - but generally that requires direct hardware access, similar to a parallel port.

By using the serial port correctly, and feeding data to a PIC, you can use an existing program like HyperTerminal to run the system.
 
can anybody post a simple VB code to send and receive bytes with a microcontroller. Just sending the keypress and displaying the return value from microcontroller
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top