Skin Temperature Measurement

This report represents the design and implementation of a skin temperature measurement system. The system aims to measure the skin temperature from a sensor and send it to the PC using a USB cable to display on screen. The data needs to be updated every second. The PIC18F4550 microcontroller has been used in this project to obtain data from the sensor and send it to the PC using USB 2.0 that has been built into the microcontroller. The microcontroller has a 10-bit Analog Digital Converting accuracy that is one of the important criteria for this design as it is going to be used for medical purposes. As the project concentrates more on designing software than hardware, the EasyPIC4 development board was used which comes with all hardware required for this project. The Jackson diagram method was used to design and implement the coding program for the microcontroller software part of the system. The MikroC IDE has been used to compile and load the program into PIC18F4550 microcontroller. The program for the microcontroller uses C language that aims to keep the USB link alive by using interrupt function. A sensor collects data from sensor as 4 bits and send it to the PC every second using a USB cable. The data received from sensor, will be sent by microcontroller to the PC. The Visual Basic software was used in the PC side of device to catch and output the data on the screen. A template file for the Visual Basic program was generated by Easy HID wizard to make software programming part easier for designer. The USBTrace analyzer has been used in the scenario any problems occur during or after the design and construction of the software. The software enables a user to monitor the data on the USB bus that sends the data to the PC from microcontroller.