Do you wish to have your devices or other projects connected to a USB port on your PC so that they could be controlled by you from your PC?
In this Hands-On project this is exactly what you will be doing.
Using a PIC18F4550 Microcontroller, you will build two 8-bit I/O ports that connect to the USB port on your PC. Once you set up these I/O ports on the PIC18F4550 chip, you will run a C# GUI application on your PC to help you read from or write to these I/O ports through the USB port on the PC.
The source code together with readymade exe files is all included with this project. You may either run the readymade code directly, or customize the source code for other applications. Enough documentation is included to help you modify the code for just about any application you may have in your mind.
On the C# GUI program you can have a READ button and a WRITE button. Clicking the READ button will invoke the READ code to help you read data from the PIC18F4550 Input port. Clicking the WRITE button will do just the reverse. That is, it will write data to the PIC18F4550 output port. The accompanying Step by Step Study Guide will walk you through the entire process in enough details to make this project an academically rewarding experience for you.
Once you build this project, you will have an endless list of applications for this project. By connecting a sensor output to the PIC18F4550’s INPUT port you can easily retrieve sensor data into the PC via the fast USB connection on your PC. Once this data is inside the PC, you can analyze it to determine the appropriate course of action, which may involve using the PIC18f4550’s OUTPUT port to activate or drive some external device for a desired corrective action.
In other words, if you are working on some project that requires some kind of closed-loop control of a system , then this project will provide you the required skills to make your PC an integral part of this closed-loop control system. Possibilities are endless when you have the intelligence of a PC incorporated into your closed loop control system.
Once you have captured data from the outside world and have brought it inside the PC, your most difficult part of the project is over. That is, from this point onward, any data analysis task could be handed over immediately to any data processing application running on the PC. There are tons of data processing programs out there for analyzing and processing data. Microsoft Excel is one such PC application which comes with all kinds of computational and analytical tools to help you analyze and process data in any way you like. Moreover, MS Excel comes with a variety of graphing options to graphically display data in any way or format you like.
To find out how you could write your own applications that work together with MS Excel to take full advantage of its built-in computational power, you may refer to our courseware, Add the Power of Microsoft Excel to your PC-based Data Acquisition System, that comes with a detailed Step-by-Step Study Guide for writing both C# as well as VB .Net applications for programmatically invoking Excel functionality from inside your progam to help you process or analyze data. It’s like making Excel part of your application.
This project, simple as it may appear, can be used time and again whenever there is a need to monitor or control any device or gadget from your PC. It’s ideally suited for students who are constantly building projects as part of their school or college coursework. Knowing how to get data in and out of the PC using the USB port on the PC, students will never run out of project ideas. A young enthusiastic school student shared with us his plans for customizing this project to create a PC controlled “table fountain” loaded with all kinds of bells and whistles one could imagine.
Apart from its academic value, this project has a career value as well. Once you complete this project you could boast it on your resume. Employers are constantly looking for folks with hands-on background on embedded systems and interfacing skills related to USB port. This project has both these ingredients to make your resume highly impressive.
