Counters
Nowadays it is very easy to display numbers and letters across multiple LED displays using micro-controllers, such as the Arduino or Raspberry-Pi, along with a small bit of software related code to display the required digits. But sometimes as an Electronics student or hobbyist we want to display two or…
The job of a counter is to count by advancing the contents of the counter by one count with each clock pulse. Counters which advance their sequence of numbers or states when activated by a clock input are said to operate in a “count-up” mode. Likewise, counters which decrease their…
As well as counting “up” from zero and increasing or incrementing to some preset value, it is sometimes necessary to count “down” from a predetermined value to zero allowing us to produce an output that activates when the zero count or some other pre-set value is reached. This type of…
We saw previously that toggle T-type flip flops can be used as individual divide-by-two counters. If we connect together several toggle flip-flops in a series chain we can produce a digital counter which stores or display the number of times a particular count sequence has occurred. Clocked T-type flip-flops act…
The electronics student or hobbyist’s always likes to make various circuits for their home or school and especially ones that flashes a few lights, and there are many circuits and kits on the market that can flash any number of LED’s or lights periodically, randomly or sequentially but one very…
In the previous Asynchronous binary counter tutorial, we saw that the output of one counter stage is connected directly to the clock input of the next counter stage and so on along the chain. The result of this is that the Asynchronous counter suffers from what is known as “Propagation…
In the Sequential Logic tutorials we saw how D-type Flip-Flop´s work and how they can be connected together to form a Data Latch. Another useful feature of the D-type Flip-Flop is as a binary divider, for Frequency Division or as a “divide-by-2” counter. Here the inverted output terminal Q (NOT-Q) is connected directly back…
An Asynchronous counter can have 2n-1 possible counting states e.g. MOD-16 for a 4-bit counter, (0-15) making it ideal for use in Frequency Division applications. But it is also possible to use the basic asynchronous counter configuration to construct special counters with counting states less than their maximum output number. For example,…