Design and implementation of wireless system by using microcontrollers and microcomputer with application to drive acquisition system

Design and implementation of acquisition system using radio frequency (ASK) module with personal computer (PC) and microcontrollers (PIC) is proposed in this work. The paper includes hardware and software design. The first part of the system is composed of measurement instruments such as sensors, electric furnaces, pneumatic process and wireless transmitter (TX). The second part consists of radio frequency receiver unit (RX), microcontroller and PC. The system was designed to measure temperatures of two electric furnaces and pressure pneumatic process. The RF link uses a transmission frequency of 433.95 Mhz to enable communication between the PIC transmitter and PC/PIC receiver. The wireless transmitter (TX) unit is directly interfaced to PIC18F4620. The graphic liquid crystal display (GLCD) is used. The user can see the parameter's changes as graphical and numerical form. The receiver (RF) module connected to a second PIC18F458 receives the signal via RF receiver, decodes the address/data and reproduces the original data via alphanumeric display (LCD) and graphic user interface (GUI) on the PC screen. For the software implementation, we developed two software packages. The firmware was written in Mikroc-PRO language dedicated for microcontrollers. We have used Visual C# to create the basic graphical user interface (GUI). The user can display the parameter's changes as graphical and digital representation on the GUI. Some experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed wireless system. This embedded system tracks the temperatures and pressure signal considerably well with a small error.