Parts List Details
Some of the parts seen above maybe be familiar to you, but if any of them are
not you can see a picture of it above. Below I have a better description of the
main parts used in this tutorial.
PIC 18F452 - PIC 18F4520
Two microcontrollers will be used in this tutorial, one for the receiver and one
for the transmitter. These will need to be programmed with the
software that we will see in that section of this
tutorial. I used a PIC 18F452 and 18F4520. These are actually the same
and can be used interchangeably.
PICKIT 2
To Load the software onto the PIC microcontroller you will need a programmer.
This programmer, called the PICkit2, is very popular and supported by the PIC
manufacturer Microchip. It's low cost and will last.
Phototransistor
This component detects the brightness of an infrared light beam. If an infrared
LED shines right into a phototransistor, it switches on, otherwise it remains in
the off state.
IR Emitter LED
IR Emitter LEDs are found in many places, most commonly in laptops and TV remote
controls. These cheap little LEDs are what we will be using to transmit the
serial communication data to the receiving phototransistor.
2x 2n2222 Transistors
A small buffer circuit will be created using these general purpose transistors.
This will allow us to switch the IR LED on and off with power directly from the
power supply.
2x 4 MHz Crystal
Both systems will use a 4 MHz crystal clock, just to make things easier on us.
You could use different clock rates for both microcontrollers, just make sure
you have the serial communication baud rate set to 9600 BPS.
Wires & Breadboard
These will be used for connecting everything together. If you'd rather use a
development board that you have, go ahead, the breadboard just creates a
versatile platform that anyone can duplicate this work on.
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