[time-nuts] Multiple Voltage monitoring

WB6BNQ wb6bnq at cox.net
Fri Jul 31 06:43:59 UTC 2009


Hi Chris,

That is an interesting item and the pricing is certainly on the inexpensive
side.  Sparkfun has it for $30.  Sure beats trying to make your own boards and
come up with the parts.

I have an old development system from "mikroElektronika" [ http://www.mikroe.com/
] for the PIC line.  They provide compilers in "C" "PASCAL" or BASIC" which
resolve to machine routines, but to be honest even though I have the BASIC
version, I never use it.  I tend to like the machine language level even though I
have not really warmed up to the PICs.

At any rate, I spend some time explaining to those on the company's forum that
the A/D is really more of a monitor then a real voltmeter.  The reason I say that
is you can never truly see zero volts, nor can you actually get to 5 volts at the
other end without some fancy hardware tricks.  The same goes for the ATMEL line.
Most of the time your not looking for the zero end of the scale so everything
works out ok.

Thanks for the link to that product.  It is certainly worthy of mention.

Bill....WB6BNQ

Christian Vogel wrote:

> Hi Bill,
>
> > I was going to suggest, depending upon Matts interests, that perhaps
> > he could use a PIC or ATMEL device with analog inputs and roll his
> > own.
> > Most PIC models have 10 bits but some do have 12 bit.  You could use
> > an external A/D for 12 bits or more.
>
> I actually used this for a laboratory setup just recently, but I only
> needed about 1% of accuracy. I bought a "Arduino Duemilanove" board
> for *?25*. This includes a FDTI USB-to-serial and a Atmel AVR
> microcontroller and is powered from USB. Their simple IDE speaks a
> preprocessed version of C and it took me 5 minutes to have my
> 3-channel-analog-to-serial software done. You can also use your
> conventional toolchain and just ignore their beginners' environment,
> though.
>
> http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove
>
>          Chris
>
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