PC volt meter with a real time software and USB microcontroller interface 

Project summary: 

This project came about one day when my wireless mouse and keyboard failed to respond of course, I knew the source of the problem was as a result of weak peripheral batteries (no-brainer), as the mouse and keyword had battery led indicators built in, I simply changed it that issue was effortlessly sorted out with that said, my curious developer side kicked in… I was curious to find out what the voltage of batteries were when they were declared unusable I thought well, I have a multi meter to measure the battery voltage but, why not make the experience more fun? Like build a 4-channel 5V meter via USB. At the time I was already building some silly “hello world” led flashing demos which quickly bored me so the motivation for this project was no surprise to me. At the time I was flirting a lot with microcontrollers and embedded systems I thought this project would be good ground work to interface and bridge .NET code with low level serial usb communications and this was the result. 

The project prototype made up of the following : 

1. A 18F PIC4550 microcontroller (running the microchip USB stack at full speed with a 20MHZ clock) 
2. Firmware was developed with MPLAB X IDE v1.30 complier completely written in pure C and some assembly for delay timing. PICKIT-3 was used to program the device. 
3. Communications using USB to serial communications real time voltage measurement software written in .NET running windows forms smart client with gauge components. 
4. IDE used to write the windows smart client was visual studio 2012 using C#.NET 

Some pictures of the project: 

I obtained the components locally see the sources below.

• http://www.mantech.co.za/ 
• http://za.rs-online.com/web/

If there's enough public interest I will be happy to publish and share the firmware and schematics.

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