Show your bread board

[circuitous]

One current project is a new board to control the navigation lights on a 400 foot radio tower.

Here's the main controller, on the breadboard, and the readings from the Vref and SPI ADC.

Uses a PIC18F26K22 as the main controller, reads settings from BCD switches and controls SSD relays via a pair of MCP23S08 SPI chips, beacon and marker lamp currents are measured using 50 Amp ACD756 hall-effect sensors, their output is digitized using an MCP3004 ADC set to take differential readings.

[dimlow]

Now, that's a very nice setup you have there. Are you a fan of Rigol equipment ?

The PIC18F26K22 looks like a nice chip to work with but is it not over kill for this project ?

[circuitous]

Dimlow:  Thanks.

I do have a bit of Rigol equipment, mostly due to the bang-for-buck.  It was really impossible to beat the feature/price of the DS4024 vs. a 4 channel Agilent 3000 series.  The Agilent might be better, but I couldn't justify the price.  Same thing for the power supplies.  As for the 6.5 digit meters, I love the Agilent 34410A (on the left).  When it came time for another meter, I go the Rigol DM3068 for its flexibility and additional features (also a lot cheaper).

I was using the 16F886, but it just really wasn't enough.  So, I moved up to the 18FxxK50, but the C18 libraries are crap in v3.45, so I settled on the K22 series.
The K22 probably is more than needed for this, but it seemed to simplify placement a bit, due to dual SPI and dual USART.  Also, the K22 works a lot better with the ICD3 debugger than any of the 16F chips did.

The last, and most complicated, part of this project will be figuring out a bootloader and the ability to upgrade the software using a USB stick.

Then it will be time to layout the board, with lots of lightning protection, fused MOVs monitored by opto-isolators, etc.

Edit:  attached shot of the bench.  Doesn't show everything... the pegboard panels on the ends of the bench slide out on rails, with pegboard and bins hanging on both sides.

[dimlow]

Now i am sooo jealous.

[Steve Johnson]

Although there's nothing on it in the photo, this breadboard itself was one of my projects back in the 80s and I still use it today.


 
It includes a variable +/- 0-20V DC power supply, 5V DC supply, adjustable clock, DMM, logic display and lots of I/O connectors. The matching audio generator is to the right.

[steve30]

Time to resurrect this topic I think .

Here's a SOIC8 to Breadboard adapter that I just built. The chip is a MAX4172 current sense amplifier. The chips works great, and the stripboard bodge is fine, though I'll probably manage to do it a bit neater next time.

The chip is used to monitor the current output from my bench PSU design. The voltage output of the chip will be connected to an Arduino, so it can measure the current.