Hi tecsploiters!

Todays post is all about Potentiometers, i decided to write this after I needed to use a potentiometer to adjust the contrast of an LCD display I was trying to get working with my STM32F4 Discovery (this is still a work in progress).

So what is a Potentiometer? the name sounds complicated – but really they aren’t to difficult. A potentiometer is a bit like a variable resistor – and can be used as a variable resistor, accept it has 3 pins – where as a resistor has only 2.

What a potentiometer does differently to a resistor is split – or divide the circuit. You attach one pin to -ve , one pin to +ve and the third pin is then a positive somewhere between 0 and the value of the positive lead. This value is controlled by adjusting the potentiometer and can be used for a variety of things, in this case I’ve use one to control the brightness of an LED.