Mice Treadmill Rotation Counter (MTRC)

Among the pets we have in house, our daughter also has two mice.

Mouse Speedy	Mouse Minoes

The initial plan was to have the two mice and there cage in her bedroom. After one night this changed; the mice were hyper
active, and Chantal did not sleep because of all the noise they generated. We could have known of course, because mice
are night creatures and are hyper active at night, especially in the 'treadmill'. So the whole 'circus' was moved downstairs
to the living room.

Above the mice cage with MTRC electronics and reed sensor attached to the treadmill.

Because the mice were so active in the treadmill, we asked ourselves how many rounds did they run every night?
The idea was born to fabricate an electronic counter that would count every rotation the treadmill would make, the
Mice TreadMill Round Counter, or MTRC.

The following specs were defined:

• Count every rotation of the treadmill
• Automatically store the number of rotations
• Restore number of rotations after power loss on the display
• Use LED's for low power consumption and bright display at evening/night
• Use Atmel PIC
• Use Reed switch with (powerful) magnet so treadmill would not have to be modified

So I created the MTRC, see the photo's below:

Board with 16 x Alpha Numeric LED display's (bottom white line), Transistor drivers left and middle, Power supply Left top, Atmel PIC and MUX right	Electronics board as seen from the bottom.	Treadmill seen from the top with the powerful magnet on the right and the reed switch (in black shrinking tube) on the left, secured with white electrical tape.

Used components:

• ATMega16 PIC (Why this one? Because I had it lying around ;-))
• CD 4514 MUX BCD to 16 Line decoder
• BC457 Driver Transistors
• PSC08-11HWA Alpha Numeric LED Display's
• 7805 5V Voltage Regulator

Schematic:

The software running in the PIC has two counters; 1 counter is running continuously to update the LED displays with
the actual number of rotations. I used alphanumeric LED displays so I could also display text. Whenever a rotation is
sensed on one of the PIC input pins, the internal rotation counter is updated, and thus displayed.
The second counter is activated when activity is sensed on the treadmill; after approx 10 seconds a routine is called
that will store the number of rotations in the PIC's EEPROM. So if in one way or the other a power loss occurs, the
software will - on start - reload and display the last number of rotations known.

This actually turned out to be a success: now, every morning our daughter writes down the number of rotations the treadmill has made, and calculates
the precise number of rotations of the last night. So below a listing of one page from the 'log book';

* = not connected.

There is one drawback however; sometimes after cleaning the cage, our daughter forgets to reconnect the sensor, missing out on the rotations of those
disconnected nights.

Below one month worth of running;

Maandag = Monday, Dinsdag = Tuesday, Woensdag = Wednesday, Donderdag = Thursday,
Vrijdag = Friday, Zaterdag = Saterday and Zondag = Sunday.

As you can see there are nights the mice do 20.000+ rounds, and there are nights
the do less than 2000. This may be due to the fact that there are sometimes two
treadmill's in the cage, with one not connected to the counter....

However 20.000+ rotations in one night is impressive!!

So, when I made this description, the total number of rotations from the day I connected the counter
up until this day is 701454. See Below:

* Rondjes = Rotations

When the software detects that there is activity on the treadmill, it will start an internal counter. After approx 10 seconds the software
will trigger the STORE routine, so that the current number will be stored into the PIC's internal EEPROM.

*Opslaan = Save