NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger

Commercial NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger, As you may have noticed, are not that Efficient when it comes to charging time. There might be some expensive models but we are not referring to that. One of the solution is using Intelligent NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger created by Peter Hayles. This Efficient NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger build using microcontroller PIC 16C711. Because it will reduce the complexity of the circuit. He says that with the DIY charger he managed to cut the charging time from 4 hours to 1.5 hours max. This sound good to me.

"This cheap and easy to build NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger is suitable for automatically charging a wide range of batteries for many applications. Proper chargers are usually expensive and cheap chargers supplied with the original equipment often incorrectly charge the cells and dramatically shorten their life. This 'intelligent' charger was designed for high current and rapid charge applications such as cordless power tools and model racing cars."

Download for the schematic and document (Zip file), click here.

Controlling AVR with Visual Basic

The purpose of this microcontroller project is to give the student a figure out about How to Control AVR Devices using Visual Basic (PC). To comunnicate between PC and Microcontrller, it use RS232. So, this is not a stand alone project. From this general microcontroller project the student can improve and made more specific to meet their requirement. This project creted by Serasidis

"The use-range of this application is very high. You can make, anything you want, that its need control from PC computer or some circuit that is collect data from somewere, and at the end, its give this data to PC computer via RS232 port to our software"

For VB code, schematic, document you can download here (i've collected them in one zip file)

Card Reader using Microcontroller

This is a simple version of Card Reader. Why? because this Magnetic Card Reader only in read only environment. It only read the information stored in magnetic card. The purpose of the project is used as card debugger. There are three main part in this project :

• A reader to capture digital characters from the card
• A RISC microcontroller to store data and check for errors
• A display to relay the magstripe contents to the viewer

As processor it use microcontroller AVR ATtiny 2313. For Reader it uses Panasonic ZU-M2121S451 Reader. and for display use LCD 16x2.

"The Magstripe (Track 2) Reader project can be used to view numerics stored a magnetic data card. Although there is no writeback ability, the device is very useful as a card debugger. The treatise will use an LCD character display to relay this data to the user. The circuit uses an AVR microcontroller and can modified to work with similar RISC controllers."

Although the card reader can't write back to magnetic card, I guess this is a one of good reference to learn how card reader work. For download the reference clik here (zip file)or visit this link
Thanks to Brady Mayes for great card reader based on microcontroller.

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