Specifications

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systems, appliances, power tools, toys, and implantable medical devices. Since most
microcontrollers are able to operate at clock rates as low as 4kHz and draw only
nanowatts worth of power while sleeping they are very useful for applications that
require long term battery usage.
One of the most common uses of microcontrollers is with LED or LCD displays. As it is
our desire to use an LCD display in our design, a microcontroller would be used to
program the display. As it is our desire to only incorporate a very basic user display
system in our design, it would not be a hard task to program the microchip for this
purpose. Furthermore, other specific tasks that we may wish to accomplish in our final
design may also require a separate microcontroller. This would mean that our final
design would include multiple microcontrollers. Below is an illustration of how an LCD
display would be connected to a microcontroller.
Figure 30 - LCD/Microcontroller Interconnection
Permission Pending
The function of a microcontroller is to take real world or user input and to express the
results of its program as an output. This is done through both the input and output pins
on the side of the microcontroller. The program that executes within the microchip will
need to be written by our group for our specific purposes. Common lower level