Music Equalizer Display Based on PIC18F452

The purpose of the project is to create a device that will take a standard headphoneaudio signal, interprets it, and outputs the voltage amplitude onto an LED bar which should change rapidly with the flow of music beat & rhythm.

The internal analog to digital converters of the PIC will be used to accomplish this project while building the circuit on a small breadboard. The brain of the project will be the PIC18F452 microcontroller but any model of the PIC can be used as long as it has ADC. The LED bars come in all types of sizes, colors, and shapes. The clock speed will be handled by the 20MHz oscillator with 5MHz instruction frequency. Using the same clock speed is important in order to output correct values or the software can be adjusted for different clock speed.

A voltage divider will use two resistors where the divided voltage serves as a reference for the ADC. This will compare the audio signal to 2.5V instead of 5V. A reference voltage that maximizes the control over the equalizer output is being used since the music signal has significantly lower voltage than the power supply.

Rest of the project