Build a Raspberry Pi Pico voltmeter
Few tasks in the life of an engineer can compete with the degree of satisfaction achieved by creating test equipment. Be it a testing rig or a generic piece of equipment, there’s always something to learn (and fun to be had).
This tutorial will see us take the first steps towards the creation of a basic multimeter. While our product won’t be seeing the multimeter designers at Agilent or, Danaher filing for unemployment benefits, the product will demonstrate aspects of analog and digital design. Most interestingly, we’ll implement auto-ranging to ensure that ADC resources are always used optimally.
Multimeters with graphical displays are a recent development – a few years ago, alphanumeric reigned supreme. Fortunately, Solomon Systech‘s SSD1306-based display controller made graphical displays affordable. The screen used in the following steps can be purchased at AliExpress for less than £4 a pop. Investing some more money leads to its larger brother – the SSD1351 provides full-colour output.
Should you ever feel like going into series production, be aware that not all OLEDs are created equal. In recent projects done by the author, contrast differences between different display vendors were visible.
Building new circuits is best done in a step-by-step process. With this in mind, let’s begin by bringing up the display in accordance with the figure (above).
Show and tell
Organic displays often display. Simply create a new tab in the IDE, and save it to the Raspberry Pi Pico.
