Use of Microcontrollers in Automation and Control of Experimental Procedures in Chronobiology

*Corresponding author email: gleisonparente@oi.com.br, edu.sf@hotmail.com Introduction: This project was developed in the embedded project discipline of electrical engineering course of the Rio Grande do Norte Federal University in partner with the laboratory of chronobiology for the development of a data acquisition circuit for reduce costs with the use of a specific purpose processor while other solutions using general purpose processors that are more expensive, it was developed in 18F4550 PIC microcontroller of the MICROCHIP™ company. Methods: The embedded program in the microcontroller was developed in C and ASSEMBLY code, and the control program installed on the personal computer to send data to controller can to be development in JAVA, C# or Lab VIEW code. Results: The project contains two parts. In the first part, the embedded system would have to do a light control and timing ON/OFF of the time ranging between one second and some days, adjusted by user using the control program, with registered output. Other feature of the embedded system is that would have to send a log if the lamp doesn’t light and identify the status of the lamp if ON or OFF, also, would have to do the control of the light turn on, and turn off, independent between them. This definition of the time is user defined using a control program that send data for the circuit. In the project, the number of the lamps controlled by software was fifteen, because each lamp was adjusted to four cages, thus, was possible to do the control of the light of sixty cages. The other part of the project was the movement registered with multiple sensors, where the sensors would have to do the register for each two millisecond. The number of cages was the maximum possible to the hardware of the PIC, and the counting of the movement in the cages would have to be limited for a time defined by user by software. All these data will be sent the PIC to the personal computer and the personal computer to the PIC using the USB communication. Conclusion: we get more capacity and lower cost with the use of the 18F4550 PIC microcontroller because this device is cheaper that general purpose device and the embedded system developed is more efficient for data acquisition. Publication History Article published online: 16 June 2026 © 2009. Brazilian Sleep Academy. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Thieme Revinter Publicações Ltda. Rua Rego Freitas, 175, loja 1, República, São Paulo, SP, CEP 01220-010, Brazil