Last time, we designed the printed circuit board and other hardware for our controller. This round, we’ll design the software.
Previously, we discovered how easy it is to add objects to the Nextion display, dress them up, and communicate with a PIC MCU. In this installment, we build the Small Engine Ignition Timing Controller and Programmer hardware.
Part 1 of this mini-series was also Nextion Part 3 (last Issue), where we started designing a programmer for our Small Engine Ignition Timing Controller. So, consider this installment really Nextion Part 4. Now, we build the Tune and DataLog Pages.
You have found or designed a circuit, and it’s time to build a permanent version of it. You could design and order (or make) a printed circuit board, but that will cost money and/or time. It also makes changes and corrections difficult. The obvious alternative: Implement the circuit on one or several prototyping boards. So, how do you go about building on a protoboard? I’ll describe a sequence of steps here.
Back in Part 1 of this series, we designed a simple Nextion display screen and got it to do stuff. However, the look was rather droll. In this installment, we’ll use the Nextion in a special application (building a small engine ignition timing controller) and make the screen sizzle.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) projects that use sensors, actuators, displays, or controllers can easily communicate through an MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) server, or broker. The MQTT standard lets devices publish and subscribe to specific topics. When they use the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format to exchange information, software can easily interpret or parse it. In this tutorial, I'll explain how to create and parse JSON messages.
In the first article, we downloaded the Nextion IDE, built a couple screens with various objects, and tested it in simulation. For this installment, we’ll actually be loading software onto a real Nextion TFT display and interacting with a PIC16F1824 microcontroller programmed with ME Labs PBP3 BASIC software. Finally, it will be tested on a breadboard.
Touch screens are fast becoming the “standard” for use in your homebrew projects. One of the more popular ones is the Nextion unit. In this first installment of a tutorial series, we’ll download the Nextion IDE Editing Software, load several prefabbed objects, and check our work on a simulator.
The Parallax Propeller chip is an impressive multi-core microcontroller ... and the Propeller FLiP board makes it even more powerful! See how to integrate these together in your projects.
If you’ve written a program for a microcontroller board such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Propeller QuickStart, you have relied on software libraries that provide constants and functions. Often, we use software libraries without thinking much about them. Even if you never create a library, you probably want to know how they work and what they contain. This tutorial provides information that gives you a good start.
