Matrix keypads are very common input devices in embedded systems. They have simple architecture and are easy to interface. One good thing about them is that they allow you to interface a large number of input keys to a microcontroller with minimum usage of  I/O resources. This tutorial describes two different approaches of reading input data from a 4×4 (16 keys) matrix keypad interfaced to a PIC microcontroller. The pressed key information is displayed on a character LCD. The microcontroller used in this experiment is PIC16F1827.
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