Wireless Alarm- 48 tramsmitters, 1 reciever. microcontroler?

[agwill]

I am currently trying to build my own wireless alarm system. I have the wireless PIR, encoder and transmitter circuits sorted, along with the reciever, decoder and Alarm schematics. I have a good understanding of basic electronics but this seems a little over my head. I need to get the main board to recognise the serial data output from the decoder and check it against a definable list. The list will have data on which transmitters correspond to which zones of the alarm. it will then show (via led's or a dot matrix display) which transmitter has been triggered.
Is this too much and will a microcontroller do the trick??
Any help is much appreciated.

AG.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Re: Wireless Alarm- 48 tramsmitters, 1 reciever. microcontro

I am currently trying to build my own wireless alarm system. I have the wireless PIR, encoder and transmitter circuits sorted, along with the reciever, decoder and Alarm schematics. I have a good understanding of basic electronics but this seems a little over my head. I need to get the main board to recognise the serial data output from the decoder and check it against a definable list. The list will have data on which transmitters correspond to which zones of the alarm. it will then show (via led's or a dot matrix display) which transmitter has been triggered.
Is this too much and will a microcontroller do the trick??
Any help is much appreciated.

Should be no problem, a micro-controller will be it easily.

 

[agwill]

Thanks for that. One other bit that i'm unsure of. Would I be able to use one chip or will it be easier to use several and have them talk to each other. I have the sensors, a keypad, LCD, different arming modes, an external input and output to my cameras, may be a modem (later on) etc ,all to deal with.

I hope to get started on the tutorials soon and learn as much as possible about this fasinating subject. One other question is, will it be better to buy one of these ready built programmers, say from Maplin's (eg the PIC START), or should I build the one sujested on your website (I have limited experience building PCB's).

Thanks again for your help , it is much appreciated. I will post any questions in the future on the support forum.

AGwill.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

The PICStart+ has the big advantage that it supports a huge amount of PIC's, and it's updated very regularly - but it is very expensive, and it is very slow.

You can buy kits for the P16PRO40 VERY cheaply (try Quasar Electronics), and using my programmer software makes it the fastest PIC programmer available.

 

[e]

I highly recommend the ICD2, its very fast and allows for debugging, i really never use my PIC START + much anymore its just much too slow. The ICD2 will program a large chip 877, 458 etc in a few seconds and is really nice since you can set it up to re-program the chip after assembling the code all with 1 program (MPLAB)

 

[agwill]

Sorry one last question,

After consulting the Quasar web site, they have said "we have found problems running this hardware on faster PCs and Windows XP - use 3128,3144, 3149, 3150 or 3182 instead."

I run on XP professional, is this going to be a problem?

Are the alternatives sujested by them good alternatives?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Sorry one last question,

After consulting the Quasar web site, they have said "we have found problems running this hardware on faster PCs and Windows XP - use 3128,3144, 3149, 3150 or 3182 instead."

I run on XP professional, is this going to be a problem?

Are the alternatives sujested by them good alternatives?

For a start give it a try, is this this P16PRO40 you're looking at?. If so, try my software, or IC-Prog, instead - any problems are apparently with Bojan's software.

The other programmers are probably serial port or USB port, and are more expensive as they have on-board processors - as far as I know they should be fine!. They rely far less on the PC, as the programming is done by the processor on the board, not the PC itself.