Hand held portable monitoring instrument


Hand held equipment requires low power for long battery life. In this application a PIC 16c65 is used as an embedded controller to manage all the display, keyboard and power functions of this precision monitoring instrument whilst still drawing only a tiny amount of power (allowing many hours of use from a single PP3 size battery). All this functionality and 32 bit floating point arithmetic fits comfortably within the 4K code space of the PIC micro.

Force and temperature gauge


Uses a PIC16C54 to provide control for a serial LCD driver interface and a serial ADC interface (12 bit 2 channel) with power management to provide long battery life. Surface mount passive components were used on the underside of a single sided PCB offering small size and low cost. Development unit shown.

NB: Strain gauge mechanics not shown.

'Power speak' fieldbus system

Multi drop fieldbus based instrumentation / monitoring system for industrial use. Incorporates low cost management system running on a PC with trend analysis algorithms providing alarm functions. Instrument nodes monitor digital, analogue and temperature inputs. Outputs can be set for local alarms / indicators.

Capacitance measurement

Ultra stable measurement system for capacitance monitoring.  Stability to 40ppm / degree C.

Remote instrument node for offshore strain gauge and measurement

Embedded PFGA logic and an 8051 micro-controller are used to provide a control interface between specialist strain gauges, analogue sensing circuitry and a DSP host monitoring system. Designed to be used in intrinsically safe environments.