November 2009

Controlling a Milk Pasteurizer – David Rosenbaum

David’s requirement was to control a milk pasteurizer from a PC. This involved controlling some valves and logging and charting system state. The starting point was a project from the magazine Elektor Nov 2007 called USB Data Acquisition Card. The card has 8 digital inputs, 8 digital outputs, 8 analog inputs and 2 analog outputs. It is based on Microchip PIC18F4550 which has been pre programmed to allow commands to read from or write to the chip from a pc via the usb port. Problems with the C++ code that came with the project, including the use of Spanish terminology, motivated David to rewrite it in Delphi.

The presentation included a demonstration, which was particularly appreciated since David was presenting on short notice.