Weather monitoring systems are available in plenty and these are pretty handy gadgets we use in our daily life for weather forecasting and other purposes. But these kinda gadgets might be expensive and may not be available for customization to our specified purpose. To overcome these advantages you can build this customized weather meter using PIC microcontroller which won’t cost much like those gadgets. Th ...

This is a revised version of my LM35 based digital thermometer project that I posted last year. Although it is one of the simplest projects, it is very popular among newbies who are just starting to learn microcontrollers. There was a little flaw in the original project as pointed by some readers. I was using a 1.2 V reference for A/D conversion with PIC16F688 microcontroller. However, the PIC16F688 datashe ...

A bubble or spirit level meter is a handy tool to find whether a surface is horizontal or vertical. It is often carried by civil engineers, mechanical engineers, surveyors, carpenters, and many other professionals whose work involve precise alignments of horizontal and vertical planes. Original spirit levels had two banana-shaped curved glass vials at each viewing point and were much more complicated to use ...

This project is about building a microcontroller-based digital room thermometer plus hygrometer that displays temperature and relative humidity on 4 large (1 inch) seven segment LED displays which adjust their brightness level according to the surrounding illumination. It consists of a closed loop system that continuously assesses ambient light condition using an inexpensive light-dependent resistor (LDR) a ...

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 c ...

An article by Dieter Laues in the February 2012 issue of Elektor inspired me to get my soldering iron out. The article described how by measuring the frequency of the mains electricity supply in any socket, the relative load across the entire electricity network could be determined. I ordered a pre-programmed processor (of the correct supply frequency) and built a meter for the electrical engineering depart ...

I recently bought a 500ppm LCR meter from Elektor because I didn't have anything for measuring inductors or the ESR (equivalent series resistance) of capacitors, both of which are important for modern electronics, particularly switch mode regulators that have become ubiquitous. It is also more accurate than any of my multimeters and has wider measurement ranges. For example it can measure resistance from 0. ...

The Internet-of-Things Power Meter (IPM) is a device fixed on top of the regular household power meter that provides detailed information about the electricity usage. Modern power meters have a LED blinking every time a Watt is used, the IPM detects these flashes using a light sensor, counts them, saves the values to an SD card. Later the data is stored to the cloud. Usually power companies provide very rou ...

This post would provide a working example of how to make a simple Current Meter (DCM) using 16bit PIC microcontroller and a series shunt resistance. We have very precise ammeter current measurement with a 10bit ADC and with a tolerance of ±10mA. You may download code and Proteus Simulation from the download section at the bottom of this post. I am using MPLAB X IDE, C30 Compiler and Proteus Simulation on v8 ...

In this article, I will discuss how to design digital ac watt meter using pic microcontroller. Lets start with basic introduction of watt meter. What is Watt meter? Watt meter is electrical device which is used to measure real power in AC circuits and total power in DC circuits. You may have used watt meter in electrical labs. Watt meter most frequently used in electrical labs for performing various lab tas ...