Dilshan R Jayakody’s Web Log

We initially developed this USB atmospheric pressure monitor to study some operating characteristics of Bosch BMP180 sensor . BMP180 is a low-cost sensor for measuring barometric pressure and temperature. According to the datasheet this sensor can use to measure pressure ranging between 300hPa to 1100hPa . This sensor is introduced a couple of years back but still, it is popular due to lower cost and simplicity of its interface. BMP180 based sensor module We did this unit to test the BMP180 sensor more accurately and to study its behaviors. This unit is based on PIC18F2550 microcontroller and the main reason to select this MCU is because of its built-in USB 2.0 interface. BMP180 sensor monitor application To display sensor calibration data and it’s readings we did small windows application. This application display and plot temperature and pressure readings captured from the BMP180 sensor. This unit is programmed to work as a USB HID device and no special device drive...

Curve tracer is an electronic test instrument to analyze the characteristics of transistors and other discrete semiconductors. In this post we construct USB base curve tracer to analyze properties of NPN transistors. This curve tracer is build around Microchip's PIC18F4550 MCU and it use simple Windows based GUI application to plot captured data of a transistor. In this design PIC18F4550 MCU is used to establish USB connectivity, perform voltage readings and control current/voltage flow into the test subject. To minimize the cost and to make it simple, we use R2R ladder circuit to generate discrete collector-emitter voltage levels for the transistor on test. In each scan session collector-emitter voltage level get increase from 0V to 7.5V in 256 steps. In this design, "tracer" scans the transistor for 7 base current levels which are in between 7µA to 60µA. In viewer application collector-emitter voltage levels are plotted on x-axis and collector current is plotted o...

This is an automatic "monitor brightness controller" based on environmental light conditions. This system uses a USB port base sensor unit to measure the light level and control monitor brightness accordingly. We design this system to reduce eye stress by matching the monitor brightness with environmental lighting. The sensor unit of this system is built around PIC18F2550 8-bit microcontroller. To measure the light level we use LDR with MCU's inbuilt ADC. The control software of this unit is design to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems and it uses Windows API's DDC/CI related functions to control the monitors/display devices. The firmware of USB sensor use 50-point boxcar filter to get the average readout from the ADC and that value is passed to PC over USB HID interface. Thanks to this HID interface this system may not need any special device driver, and it can use in any compatible PC with a minimum amount of configuration changes. A prototype v...

This project is about USB port base true hardware random number generator and it is design around the avalanche noise which occurred in reversed biased P-N junction. This random number generator is design using commonly available electronic components. The core component of this system is Microchip’s PIC18F2550 microcontroller. The noise source is 2N3904 (Q1) transistor and LM386 low voltage power amplifier is used to amplify the incoming noise signals. This peripheral is design to work as a self-powered USB HID device. Cumulative distribution graph of random number sample In this design we use 2N3904 as a noise source because it give more noise amplitude than any another transistors which we tested. Theoretically this transistor (Q1) can be replaced with any other suitable NPN transistor like BC548, BC107, 2SC945, etc. The control software of this system is available for Linux and it’s compiled as x86 - 32bit binary file. This controller application required libusb driver ...