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Making a digital capacitance meter using microcontroller

Posted on March 25, 2012 by R-B 42 comments

Capacitors are one of the most common passive electrical components that are extensively used in all kinds of electronic circuits. In this project, we will discuss a technique of building a digital capacitance meter using a PIC microcontroller. This project can measure capacitance values from 1 nF to 99 ?F, with a resolution of 1 nF. The technique is based on measuring the time elapsed when a capacitor is charged to a known voltage through a series resistor. The microcontroller used in this project is PIC16F628A.

TENMA 72-8155 digital LCR meter

Posted on March 6, 2012 by R-B 9 comments

An LCR meter is an extremely useful device for measuring three basic impedance elements, namely, Inductance (L), Capacitance (C), and Resistance (R). Recently, I got a TENMA 72-8155 digital LCR meter from Newark for review. I was very excited to receive it as I didn’t have a dedicated LCR meter in my home lab. Here’s my quick review of this product.

Reviewing the iCA05 Graphic LCD development kit from iCircuit Technologies

Posted on January 30, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

The Graphical LCD (GLCD) displays provide more flexibility in presenting data, as compared to standard character-based LCDs. Owing to a significant drop in price lately, GLCDs have become more popular these days in the hackers’ and DIY worlds. If you are planning on doing an embedded microcontroller project including a graphical LCD display, you might be interested in this PIC-based GLCD development kit from iCircuit Technologies. This decently priced development kit will help you to get started quickly with your project. Here’s a brief review of the kit.

Digilent announces the 8th annual US regional design contest

Posted on January 26, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Digilent has just announced the 8th annual US regional Digilent Design Contest, to be held on May 6-7, 2012 in conjunction with the IEEE EIT conference in Indianapolis. Digilent Design Contests are engineering contests open to all students enrolled in any educational institution in that region. Students are challenged to create an original project using Digilent boards, whether FPGA boards featuring state-of-the-art Xilinx FPGAs, microcontroller boards featuring Microchip microcontrollers, or chipKIT boards based on the Arduino development environment. Contest enrollment begins on January 25th. Project presentations and judging will take place on May 6th, with the winners to be announced

A brief overview of Allegro ACS712 current sensor (Part 2)

Posted on January 25, 2012 by R-B 37 comments

In the first part of this discussion, the features of ACS712 device were briefly discussed. Now we will use that theory to implement the ACS712 sensor to make a simple DC current meter. The analog output voltage from the sensor is measured through an ADC channel of the PIC16F1847 microcontroller. A voltage to current conversion equation will be derived and implemented in the firmware of the PIC microcontroller and the actual load current will be displayed on a character LCD.

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