Retro City

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This is my place to play...My own little private Idaho!

Here I'll introduce projects from the 80's and 90's mainly from the venerable vaults of the great Forrest M. Mims III, when I first started in electronics I bought all of his books, including his Engineer's mini notebooks, every month or when I feel like it, I'll build projects out of the very pages of these notebooks.

Interestingly enough, some of the components are obsolete now, but some can still be acquired as I still actually am in possession of those very same components from a bygone era :)

As are the notebooks...

Schematics;

PCB design:

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PLX-DAQ v2.11 Dual Trace Transfer to Excel
David H Haffner Sr • 09/19/2017 at 12:00 • 0 comments

This is my second installment on using PLX-DAQ as an easy method of sending data from an Arduino or any AVR related MCU to Excel. Here I will be showing you how to process the data into a graphical chart for plotting it’s values…the easy way

Using a TTL 555 timer chip as a pulse generator to send a dual channel signal to Excel in Windows 10.

I set up a simple pulse generator using a TTL 555 timer chip, we will be utilizing pins 3 ( Output) and 5 (Control) as our dual signal trace, in this way we can use PLX-DAQ as a very cheap “Oscilloscope,” and transfer that data into excel and plot the data.

Ok, lets go…

Setting up PLX-DAQ so you can receive both signals;

In the highlighted area use the “unsigned long int” expression to avoid any overflow, this should be fine since our variable is only 5/1023

Next;

Included with PLX-DAQ is a beginners quick start guide that has a pretty good outline on setting up various data types, I’m using the easiest example here because it is straight forward. The highlighted area is the most important because it sets up the labeling for your columns and rows.

This is where you put your main code into, I used the ReadAnalogVoltage sketch in the Arduino IDE and modified it so PLX-DAQ can read and transfer both channels into excel. The most important part of this section is the “Data,Time,” milli_time and “,” in that sequence, the last part is a delay between 3 and 100 millisec. Why? If you don’t excel just can’t process the data fast enough no matter how much you may want to tweak the page file on your PC, believe me, I just found that a delay of 50 and a baud rate of 19200 transfers data very smoothly with no problems and looking at the video I think you may agree with me.

Lastly, for our second channel that’s easy, just rename the sensor value’s and float value to 1 and so on, and use the same delay factor and your done!

Ready to transfer to excel!!

The code can be found here; PLX-DAQ v2.11 Dual Trace

Thanks I hope you enjoyed this :)