Technical requirements

The software that we will use in this chapter is the Arduino and MPLAB X IDEs for programming the Blue Pill and the Curiosity Nano, respectively. Their installation process was described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Microcontrollers and Microcontroller Boards. We will also use the same code examples that were used in the aforementioned chapter.

In this chapter, we will also use the following hardware:

• A solderless breadboard.
• The Blue Pill and Curiosity Nano microcontroller boards.
• A micro USB cable for connecting your microcontroller boards to a computer.
• The ST-LINK/V2 electronic interface needed to upload the compiled code to the Blue Pill. Remember that the ST-Link/V2 requires four female-to-female DuPont wires.

These are fundamental hardware components that will suffice for the examples described in this chapter, and will also prove useful in other more complex projects explained in other chapters.

The code used in this chapter can be found at the book's GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/PacktPublishing/DIY-Microcontroller-Projects-for-Hobbyists/tree/master/Chapter02

The Code in Action video for this chapter can be found here: https://bit.ly/3xwFvPA

The next section explains a concise introduction to the C programming language.