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I am just a beginner with FC & embedded programming. Hence I have lots of confusions & doubts regarding this.

I thought FC will be easy for people like me but when I try to understand it, I get lots of confusions. Presently i have the following doubts:

1. Can I use FC to interface any ICs, for instance interfacing DTMF DECODER IC etc.? If yes then pl give an example.
2. Just like above How to interface DC Motor?
3. How to simulate the above interfaces so that I can ensure that my output is as expected?

About me: I am just a 3rd year Electronics & Communication Engineering student @ India.
Pl help me.. err may be teach me

Hello,

In answer to your questions.

1) Yes probably but I have never used this device. Does it have a common communications bus such as Serial, SPI or I2C? If it does then communications with the device should be fairly straight forward.

2) DC motors can be driven in a number of ways. The simplest is to use a NPN transistor to drive the motor from a pin of the microcontroller. We sell a motor control E-block which has more advanced motor driver circuitry which allows for you to drive a motor forwards and backwards at varying speed.

The schematic here shows how a motor is connected to a I/O pin using a NPN transistor or a N channel MOSFET.
http://picprojects.org.uk/projects/ppc/schematic.pdf

3) Simulation can go so far but hardware is the real test. You can use the Flowcode simulator to check that the PWM output for motor control is working and you can also check that communications eg using Serial, I2C or SPI are working correctly. A futher step in simulation can be done by using Proteus or similar software to actually simulate the processor target and the surrounding electronics but nothing beats the real hardware in my book. Even if it does mean breadboarding or veroboarding a circuit or two, getting them wrong to begin with and blowing up a device or two. This in my opinion is the fastest way to learn all of the complexities that come with designing microcontroller hardware.

TanX 4 ur Kind reply...

My decoder IC gives output in 4-bit like 1000, 0010 etc. Can u give example hw 2 interface it may be a sample example?

Nitin Mathew