Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics, Sixth Edition, 6th Edition
by Stan Gibilisco, Simon Monk
29
CHAPTER
Microcontrollers
A MICROCONTROLLER IS A SINGLE IC THAT CONTAINS WHAT WOULD HAVE PASSED FOR MOST OF A home computer in the 1980s. It includes a simple 8-bit (sometimes more) microprocessor, nonvolatile flash memory that holds a program to be run, and random access memory (RAM) to hold temporary data and values. Many microcontrollers also have some electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) that is used for nonvolatile storage of program data. That is, unlike normal RAM, the contents are not lost when the microcontroller is not powered. A microcontroller also has numerous general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins that you can use to interface with sensors, switches, LEDs, displays, etc. It is essentially a computer on ...
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