Indian ISP Reliance and Airtel blocks Torrentz Dailymotion Vimeo and many other websites

The Indian ISP’s (Internet service providers) like Reliance and Airtel blocks many popular websites like Torrentz.eu (and many torrents file sharing websites), video sharing sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo and many other popular, useful websites. When you try to access these websites from an Airtel connection – it reports “Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders”. But in fact this “blocking” is based on an order from Telecom department of India as per the TheNextWeb report. The “Reliance” guys are notorious (even months before the telecom dept issued any order)for blocking many popular video sharing sites at…

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8 channel light chaser using 8051

6 function 8 channel light chaser using 8051. A 6 function 8 channel light chaser using 8051 is shown here. The hardware and software of this circuit are very simple and the light functions gets repeated one after another  automatically. P1.0 to P1.7  of the microcontroller (AT89S51) are assigned as the output pins. Corresponding LEDs are connected to the output pins through 1K current limiting resistors (R1 to R8). The sequence by which the output pins (P1.0 to P1.7) goes high and low is determined by the program and the LEDs follow this sequence. Circuit diagram of the 6 function…

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Blinking LED using 8051

Blinking 1 LED using 8051 This is the first project regarding 8051 and of course one of the simplest, blinking LED using 8051. The microcontroller used here is AT89S51 In the circuit, push button switch S1, capacitor C3 and resistor R3 forms the reset circuitry. When S1 is pressed, voltage at the reset pin (pin9) goes high and this resets the chip. C1, C2 and X1 are related to the on chip oscillator which produces the required clock frequency. P1.0 (pin1) is selected as the output pin. When P1.o goes high the transistor Q1 is forward biased and LED goes…

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4 Books to Learn 8051 Microcontroller-Indian editions

Hello friends, it has been a while since I published here. The fact is that I have been busy working on some good projects, that I didn’t get enough time to write anything useful. This article is for students and hobbyists who are interested in playing with micro controllers. I thought of introducing you to a handful of cool and really useful books on 8051 micro controller. The books I suggest here are all Indian editions and hence links to Indian shopping site – Flipkart is only given. Very soon I will come up with an article that reviews global…

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Push pull amplifier

A push pull amplifier is an amplifier which has an output stage that can drive a current in either direction through through the load. The output stage of a typical push pull amplifier consists of of two identical BJTs or MOSFETs one sourcing current through the load while the other one sinking the current from the load. Push pull amplifiers are superior over single ended amplifiers (using a single transistor at the output for driving the load) in terms of distortion and performance. A single ended amplifier, how well it may be designed will surely introduce some distortion due to…

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Working with MPLAB IDE

Introduction to MPLAB IDE – What is it and how to install it? The above link takes you to the article about introduction to MPLAB IDE, in case if you have missed it. Having installed MPLAB IDE and one or more compiler suite, this article describes how to compile a program and extract the .hex file to program our chip. I will be using C language in this tutorial as it is requested by one of our CT readers and I will be using Microchip’s HI-TECH C compiler.   Creating and Saving a new project: Open MPLAB X and in…

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What is Real Time Operating System (RTOS)- How it works?

                When we hear the word “Operating System” the first ones that come to our mind are those we experience/use in our day to day life, say, Windows XP, Linux, Ubuntu, Windows 7 for Computer systems, Android for mobiles and many more . We mainly know that operating systems are for computers. It is a fact that most of the digital electronic devices run some sort of operating systems inside. There are many operating systems developed for micro controllers too. But here it is familiar as REAL TIME OPERATING SYSTEM. The phrase ‘REAL TIME’ indicates that the response of the…

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Introduction to MPLAB IDE

Similar to Atmel’s AVR studio, Microchip MPLAB is a feature rich IDE which integrates compiler tool-chains into the IDE itself and also supports proprietary programming devices and debuggers for the Microchip’s Controller family. Just if you have a microchip programmer such as Pickit2 or ICD2, then just plug it to the computer and all you need is to prepare your code in the MPLAB IDE and then straight away build and download the code into your controller. Downloading MPLAB IDE The newer version is MPLAB X which can be downloaded here. Here you can select the platform (operating-system) and also…

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4 Great Books to Learn Basic Electronics

For the last 3 years or so, we have been providing great educational content on electronics for free through this website. We have hundreds of circuits and theoretical articles on various topics which you can freely use to learn. But “Electronics” is a vast and wide subject and there are plenty of areas that aren’t even touched yet. We get lots of requests from readers in the form of comments and e-mails asking – How can I start learning electronics; Where to begin electronics learning; Which are the good books to learn electronics? etc. It’s a hard question to answer…

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Frequency counter circuit

Simple Frequency Counter You may have already seen various projects over many websites named Frequency counter, Digital Frequency Counter etc. I’m posting just another of them. Showing the use of timer/counter of AVR micro controller (Atmega8) in one of it’s form. This circuit can be used as a simple micro controller project for your engineering courses. Frequency of a periodic signal is the number of cycles it repeats per second!   So If we count the number of cycles recorded in a second it will directly read the frequency. So what we are going to make is a frequency counter circuit,…

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