This project has many different components, interfaced together to make a powerful application. The basic idea is to control the temperature of small baking plant or rather box, and display it on PC. Further enhancements were made to transmit the data and control over to remote PC over Ethernet.

Block Diagram

PIC18F452 is used as main controller here, Previously this project was made on PIC16F877, but had to replace it due to low memory.

Controller is responsible of maintaining the temperature and transmitting the current parameters and temperature to PC, via Ethernet.
Microchip’s PICTail Ethernet Daughter Board is being used to interface controller with PC. The board consist of ENC28J60, a standalone Ethernet controller with SPI interface.

The PC software is designed in Visual Basic 6. It consists of Real-Time plot of temperature along with other information related to Plant.

The built-in Ethernet library of MikroC provided great ease in programming Ethernet chip. While in CCS C, one needs to use external libraries which require great deal of understanding of Ethernet protocols.

I aslo used GLCD which comes with EasyPIC4 development board.  Eventually, this project provided me with good experience of interfacing PIC directly to Ethernet. Now my PIC has its own IP Address to which I can communicate even through internet