Design of a USB based Multichannel, Low Cost Data Acquisition System using PIC Microcontroller

This paper describes the design and development of a low cost Data Acquisition System (DAS) using PIC18LF4553 microcontroller for real time data acquisition. The designed DAS has 4 analog input channels having 12-bit resolution and was interfaced through the USB port of the PC. The interface to the PC is basically a USB based virtual serial port emulation using FT232R, a USB to serial UART interfacing IC. The PIC microcontroller firmware has been written in C language and compiled using MikroC compiler for PIC and downloaded to the microcontroller by using USBurn programmer for PIC. A PC application program has been also developed using MATLAB, which allows displaying the waveform of the signal(s) in real time and storing the data into the hard disk of the computer for future use and analysis.