I’ve been following Arduino and finally got my hands on an Uno and a 16×2 character LCD with RGB backlight. This new electronic world is exciting me. For years, I’ve been interested in digital control devices like LCDs, wondering how to use them, but was always blocked by the complexity of microcontrollers. However, using Arduino’s LCD library made it easy to connect the LCD, and I quickly made a stereo audio VU meter and a basic FFT spectrum analyzer.
Next, I started exploring wireless technology. I bought NRF24L01 wireless modules, a USBASP AVR programmer, a USB to UART converter, and an ATMega168 microcontroller from Ebay. Using the Mirf library, I successfully made one controller change the LCD backlight color of another controller.
After getting used to the Arduino IDE, I wanted to dive deeper into how the code truly controls the chip. So, I downloaded Atmel Studio 6, the ATMega168 chip datasheet, and followed tutorials on avrfreaks.net to learn the basics of AVR microcontrollers, starting from timers and interrupts. Now, I’ve grasped the basics of AVR microcontrollers and have many project ideas involving AVR uCs.
