Mircoprocessor Cable Tester

Thread Starter

deegan

Joined Nov 18, 2013
7
Hello, :confused:

I doing a project at the moment on making a simple cable tester. To check that RG45 ,RG14 and M12 4 pin sensor cable are wired up correctly. I thought about doing it with 555 timer and connecting to counting circuit and but led through the outputs. But found that need 3 sets of theses circuits. So thought i turn my hand to micro processor. Gosh there lot of different things to know. I remeber at college using ladder logic and that was it. I was hoping for simple test button for each cable and an LCD screen that would read good cable or bad cable. Ive got very little programing experience just so you know.

Thank You
 

shteii01

Joined Feb 19, 2010
4,644
Seems simple enough. You have 4 wire cable. You use microcontroller board with 4 pins for outputs, 4 pins for inputs, and 6 or 10 pins for lcd.

When one output pin is ON, corresponding input pin should go ON. If input pin does not go ON, then cable is not wired correctly. Do that for each wire/pin of the cable.

The complexity is up to you. You can show error message as soon as one test failed or you can test all four wires/pins of the cable and then display error message, or you do four tests then display error message and include which wires/pins failed the test. You can use simple lcd or you can use SPI bus lcd or you can use I2C bus lcd that uses just two wires. So setup a Plan Minimum, that will tell you how many pins your microcontroller card/kit will need to provide, then add complexity.

My own experience is with Arduino microcontroller card, it uses Atmel microcontroller, it uses C like language to program. I can visualize how I would do this project. I will not say that it is simple project, but it does not appear to be very complex.
 

shteii01

Joined Feb 19, 2010
4,644
There might be something, but I doubt it is cheap.

Honestly, just buy 10 dollar microcontroller card that has free programming environment (meaning the software to write the code and load it to the card) and some led. And go play with turning led on and off. That is basically what you are going to do with the cable tester. Send voltage from one end, if it arrives on the other end, cable is good. If it does not arrive on the other end, then at least that one wire in the cable has failed or was connected incorrectly.

If you choose a well established and supported product like Arduino microcontroller or PIC microcontroller, there are tons of tutorials you can simply copy the code from. I think the biggest amount of code you will need (to write or borrow) is for the lcd.
 
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