A teaching media of using the busy bit and SDCC in displaying character string on LCD in MCU 8051 IDE

Abstract

The author developed an instructional media of active learning teaching of microcontroller 8051 by using busy bit routine before displaying a string of characters on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD). Initially this simulator simulated how to configure the pins of both LCD pins and Microcontroller Pins by using C programming statements to enable them to configure and communicate properly, and then it will be followed by how to use the busy bit to develop a routine as substitute for using wait loop to wait for the LCD to be ready before giving the next commands to be done by the LCD controller. It can be seen obviously from the simulator that using busy bit routine effectively dodges one from calculating the exact time of the waiting time of the loop before giving the controller the next job or work to be executed. Finally, it showed how to display the string of character stored in a specific memory location of the Microcontroller on the LCD screen. This program of simulator was developed in Micro Controller Unit (MCU) 8051 Integrated Development Environment (IDE) widely known as MCU 8051 IDE and by using C language of Small Devices C Compiler (SDCC).