Intro To Digital Timers: Introduction

           Since the dawn of electronics, we have used them for keeping time. With the coming of digital electronics and the widespread usage of high frequency clocks we are now able to keep time at very fast rates.
           Most if not all microcontrollers will have digital timers inside of them. In simple terms, a timer is just a counter that, with every clock cycle input, counts up to a predefined value.
           Below is an example hardware timer (1st picture). For this tutorial we will use a PIC microcontroller's built-in timers (2nd picture).

74HC590 - Example Counter PIC - 18F452 (What We'll Use)

Purpose & Overview of this project
           The goal of this project is to understand how the digital timers in the PIC work. To do this we'll blink a few LEDs using the timers available in the PIC. Each LED will be setup for a specific blinking interval.