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PIC-Powered Timer Project
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Timers make great electronic projects. Especially this one. Now before you say that I can go down to my local hardware store and pick one up that has an LCD and every possible conceivable feature for less than the price of my daily bus ticket - simply put, you just can't go and buy anything quite like this. It's entirely unique in all regards. The timer uses an 8 WAY dip switch bank to accept user-defined intervals in seconds, minutes & hours. This is all done in BCD. Binary Coded Decimal. So you'll need to brush up on your binary counting to be able to drive it. At a glance, directly above the dip switch bank is a bar graph LED display. This display is driven by the two push buttons adjacent to the dip switches. The menu is quite self-explanatory, so I'll just go as far as to say that, toggling the menu button navigates you through the menu while pressing enter will load the current menu item with the data that's set on the dip switches. So to begin with, when you first power it up, the event number LED on the display will be lit. Here you're required to select an event from 1 to 8 on the dip switches, after doing so it's now just a matter of pressing enter. Now, pressing the menu button after this will navigate you through the display to show the seconds LED on. Same as before with the event number you're required to select a value on the switches, this time between 0 to 255 followed by hitting enter. It's a snack, so I'll leave it at that, except to say that there would be literally countless practical applications for a timer such as this. Just to name a few; irrigation, security lighting, general purpose automotive, the list is huge! Especially when you consider that it has the ability to operate cyclically with up to 8 events. One last thing before we move on to the schematic - the events are executed sequentially, starting from the duration of the relay being switched on to the amount of time that it's switched off. And yes, you guessed it, it could be configure it to oscillate. Would make a great lamp flasher too. But a word of caution, don't attempt to switch mains voltages unless you're entirely competent with working with them.
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Trent Jackson
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