All About Technology

In Electronics, the basic definition of a sensor is a device or a module that senses a physical parameter in the environment and converts the measured parameter into information that is usually understandable by a processor or a micro-controller. The electronic sensors we use with respected to Embedded Systems and IoT convert the physical parameter into electrical voltage or a digital logic level(which is same as voltage but only allowing 2 levels i.e. 0 and Vcc). It is very important to understand that as we human beings have senses that help us obtain information and process it, the micro-controller or processor can obtain such physical information through these electronic sensors.  So knowing and understanding these sensors is very important if we want to build an application or a smart device using IoT. Our device or application via the sensors can obtain all sorts of information from the real world like temperature, pressure, concentration of variety of gases, infrared s...

With reference to the Blinking on-board LED program , let us try blinking a LED externally connected to arduino board at pin 12. The program will be very similar to the previous one. Only change will be the pin number which will be 12 as we are now operating on Pin 12 where external LED is attached. Schematic Brief Run down of the Program: In the set up portion, we will declare pin 12 as output by using pinMode(12,OUTPUT).   In the loop portion, our algorithm will remain same. However, we will have to use the digitalWrite() function on the pin 12 to specify the output on that pin. For high(LED on), digitalWrite(12,HIGH) and for low(LED off), digitalWrite(12,LOW). Please try to write the program yourself by using the information above so that you get into the habit of programming. I have reduced the delay time to mix things a little ;).

As mentioned in the previous articles, Arduino board is a great way to start rapid prototyping and application development. Similarly, ESP8266 is a great standalone chip or a standalone development board to step into the IoT world. Arduino & Assosciated Components:  For starting with Arduino, a basic arduino Uno board and a USB cable to plug the arduino to the PC will be required. However, i don't recommend buying only arduino as you will be very limited with the applications you can develop or the experiments that you can do. Many online sites sell basic Arduino Starter Kits. These kits in my opinion are worth the purchase to start developing applications. You can check one such kit  here . You can also go ahead and search on other sites like Flipkart, ebay etc. Such kits contain various components and pieces like Breadboard, Connecting Wires(M-M,M-F,F-F), Resistors, Capacitors, LED's, Motors, Relays, Switches etc other than the basic Arduino Uno board and its USB cabl...

Now, with the upload successfully done, lets write the basic "Hello World" Program of electronics world. In electronics, the basic program that's written is testing a LED. Before proceeding with this program, i would suggest a quick read on  GPIO pins of arduino. Fortunately, there's an on-board LED attached to the pin 13 on Arduino board. So in a nutshell, we will be controlling this LED attached to the pin 13 on Arduino. You can find a rough schematic of our little experiment here. This schematic is inbuilt in the arduino board and is just for our understanding. Later on, we can extend this concept to controlling an external LED. I am simply posting the entire code snapshot here as it is a very basic code and is available everywhere. You can also find the blink example in the examples under File Menu. Now, lets go over the different sections of the program. This will also explain the basics of arudino programming and the functions being used. The Setup o...

This is my Lamp prototype/Project made on a ESP based custom board called Octabrix ( This board is made by a startup called iB Hubs). With a simple app, i can control the colors of my lamp including any color that can be provided by a combination of Red, Green and Blue. There's also a provision of switching the lamp off. In addition to this, i have integrated voice control in this project. I can also control the lamp by asking Alexa(Amazon's Voice Assistant) to change it's color or switch it off. Basic Architecture: Here, i have a wifi based ESP8266 board called Octabrix that connects to the router at my home and then to the Blynk Cloud Server. The mobile App created on Blynk platform also connects to the Blynk Cloud Server. Thus, having common blynk server, i can send commands using the app to my hardware device(Octabrix). Voice Control integration through Alexa is obtained by using another cloud service called IFTTT. In-depth details regarding the project wil...

Now, with everything setup, plug in your Arduino Board. If the drivers have been installed successfully, the PC should detect the board. Under the "Tools" option in the IDE, select the "Board" option and from the sub menu, select Arduino UNO as the board. Again, select "Port" option from the "Tools" menu and select the com port that is present there. In case of  multiple com ports, you will need to check in the Device manager to which port the arduino is attached to. Now, Simply Click on "New" under the "File" menu to open a new sketch. Alternatively, click on the "New" button below the toolbar. Don't worry about writing anything in your sketch. Let's first upload the blank sketch and check if the upload is successful or not. You can follow the video below to see a video guide for uploading the program. When you click on Upload, first an operation called compiling takes place. Compiling basically checks...

Now, that you have Arduino IDE downloaded and installed, fire it up by clicking the icon that must have appeared on your desktop. When you first open the IDE, a window will open up that shows something called as a sketch. Every program that we write in the IDE is called a sketch. On the toolbar, you can see a variety of options similar to every windows program. You can click File   to open a menu that gives variety of options like "New", "Open", "Open Recent" etc. There are several other options that can be explored as you get familiar with the tool. Go ahead, and click on the "New" option in the File menu. This will open a new sketch with some default codes present in your sketch. Also, you can notice some buttons below the toolbar. These are shortcut buttons for : Verifying the Sketch Uploading the Sketch Create a new Sketch (What we did just now) Open an existing Sketch Save the current sketch The above options are self explanatory...

Today, let me tell you about an efficient and low cost Microcontroller Board called Arduino. Some of the salient features of Arduino are : Microcontroller: ATmega328. Operating Voltage: 5V. Input Voltage (recommended): 7-12V. Input Voltage (limits): 6-20V. Digital I/O Pins: 14 (of which 6 provide PWM output) Analog Input Pins: 6 Now, A micro-controller is basically a small chip that has a processing element, memory elements as well as different peripherals on a single chip. We generally program the micro-controller by writing instructions either in assembly language or Embedded C, compiling that program and then burning the program on the micro-controller so that we can observe our results. Now, learning these languages in itself is a big task. Then, we additionally need a programmer to transfer the programming file onto the micro-controller. We also require some GPIO(General Purpose Input Output) pins so that we can interact with the Micro-controller. Arduino i...