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Choosing a microcontroller

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nishmehta

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Hey Everyone,

I need to control a set of valves which need to be turned on and off at intervals of a few hours. I was thinking of using an 8051 microcontroller -with its in-built timer- to do this job. I plan to use a keyboard matrix and a LCD to input into the 8051 the valve timings.

I have previously used this chip and i know it is quite complex. In that case, I had used Assembly language to program the chip, which made it very tedious!
I had done most of my work by reading the book on 8051 by Ayala....and thats as far as my knowledge extends....when it comes to microcontrollers.


Well, my questions are as follows:

1) Is there an easier way to achieve my objective? Can I use a smaller more basic chip or something like basic stamp? (i need to control 7 valves atleast...so i would require atleast 7 Digital o/p)

2) In case, the 8051 is my only option, is there any easier way to program the 8051 rather than using the Assembley language code?

3) Is there any way i could eliminate the keyboard and LCD and input the valve timings into the micro-controller directly from a PC?....maybe using something software like LabView.

Thanks a lot,

Nishit.
 
answering question 3; you can control the whole thing from a PC..
question 2 ; i understand that you can use C and Basic that i know of , to program the 8051..
Question 1 ; you have some way to read the status of each valve? open or closed?.. in which case you will need 7 digital inputs also..
 
PICs are also capable of doing this job. Basic Stamp is a PIC dumbed down/slowed down to the point of being silly (and costs 10x-20x too much), I don't see any reason to use them these days. You'd just want to use the PIC chip. The PIC18 series has a couple of good C compilers you can use to get started without resorting to assembly.
 
Your 8051 chip should be fine for this job.

C is a commonly used language for microcontrollers. http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/ is a free C compiler for the 8051. In general C code is much faster to write than assembly.

Labview has easy to use blocks for RS232 communication (the serial port on your computer). The UART on your 8051 can talk to the serial port with a MAX232 chip to change the voltage levels.
 
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