0-20V Digital Voltmeter (DVM) using PIC12F683

After finishing the serial LCD project, it is time to do some cool projects using PIC12F683. Now we can have a nice LCD display with PIC12F683. This project shows how to make a digital voltmeter of range 0-20V using PIC12F683. Enjoy!

Background
You cannot feed 20V  directly to a PIC I/O pin, you need a resistor divider network that converts 0-20V range into 0-5V. The figure below shows how it will be achieved.

At any instant, the voltage Va will be 1/4th of the input voltage, Vin. So, for maximum input voltage of 20V, the Va will be 5V. A 5.1V Zener diode in the figure is to prevent Va to rise above 5.1V if the input voltage goes much above 20V. This will protect the microcontroller port. The analog voltage Va is read through AN0 port and is converted to 10-bit digital number (0-1023) by PIC12F683.

A Versatile Temperature Data Logger using PIC12F683 and DS1820

Introduction
There are varieties of digital temperature logger projects available online based on different microcontrollers. The one I am going to talk about is based on a Microchip's 8-pin microcontroller, PIC12F683. It reads temperature values from a DS1820 digital sensor and stores in its internal EEPROM. PIC12F683 has 256 bytes of internal EEPROM and we are going to store the temperature values in 8-bit format. This means only the eight most significant bits of temperature data from DS1820 will be read and as such the temperature resolution will be of 1 degree C.

My temperature logger has following features:

• Reads temperature from a DS1820 sensor and stores in the internal EEPROM locations.
• Can store up to 254 temperature values. EEPROM location 0 is used to store the sampling interval, and location 1 is used to store the number of records.
• Three sampling interval options: 1 sec, 1 min, and 10 min. This can be selected during powering up.
• Start and Stop buttons for control operations.
• The recorded temperature values can be sent to PC through a serial port. A separate Send button is available to initiate data transfer.
• A LED to indicate various ongoing operations.
• Reset button to clear all previous records.  

Experiment No. 3: Analog to Digital Converter with PIC12F683

As mentioned before, 4 out of 6 GPIOs in a PIC12F683 also provide analog-to-digital converter inputs with 10-bit resolution. They are GP0-GP2, and GP4. In this experiment we will feed an analog voltage to one of the ADC inputs (say AN0, which is GP0) and display the output digital value on a hyper-terminal window on PC. The analog voltage will be simulated with the potentiometer on our board.

Experimental Setup:
Connect the output of potentiometer (POT2) to AN0 (pin 7). GP5 (pin 2) will serve as TX pin for Software UART so connect it to input Tx of TTL to RS232 Level Shifter circuit. Also connect Rx (2) and Gnd (5) of a RS232 port to the board. This is similar to what we did in Experiment No. 2.