Interfacing with a switch in an external circuit

Maybe try changing R1 to around a 200K.

 

I just picked a standard resistor value that would drop your final voltage to below 10% of your 5V bus, for a good, solid "low", without being so high of an impedance, that your pullup "high" was too noisy.

 

The external circuit cspenser is interfacing with has a fairly stiff pull up to an LED and 560 ohm resistor connected to +8VDC so the diode helps avoid a latchup. Since the external circuit has it's own blocking diode and 15k series diode, it's too much of a good thing.

What's odd is that should still result in more than a 30mv drop. I suspect, like you, the input pin on the PIC chip is one of those that doubles as an output pin when it's not being read as an input and it's set to a '1'. PICs are weird like that. It's been ten years since I messed with them so I may have it wrong for this model PIC.

 

According to the PIC datasheet the RA1 pin is a tri-state I/O port which in the floating state acts as a high impedance input port with leakage current of +/- 1 uA and TTL logic levels, i.e., 0.0-0.8 V is logic Lo, 2.4-5.0 V is logic Hi. The first question is how large can R1 be and still pull the input Hi? In this case, R1 = (5.0 - 2.4)/(1 uA) = 2.6 M. The second question is how small can R1 be and still have the input pulled Lo? Or stated another way, how much current can flow through D1 and R3 to generate 0.8 V at the input port? Now if there were no forward voltage drop across D1, then I = (0.8 V)/(15 K) = 53 uA. At that current level we can assume the forward voltage drop across the diode will be 0.5 V, then I = (0.8 - 0.5)/(15 K) = 20 uA. So use a value of 20 uA + port leakage current = 21 uA. In this case, the smallest value of R1 would be R1 = (5.0 - 0.8)/(21 uA) = 200 K. So pick a value for R1 somewhere between 200 K and 2.6 M and it should work. What I would pick is 330 K.

 

Oops – I didn’t mean to frustrate you with the answer I tossed out, cspencer! Actually, I didn’t go so far as to pick up my calculator, and work out the exact final voltage including diode drop. Most of my designs have a tendency towards “Meatball Engineering” – since I’m the main decision-maker in a high-stress manufacturing environment. In fact, I wouldn’t really consider using the specific diode called out – with a forward drop of 715 mV at only 1 mA. I typically use a schottky diode in this kind of circuit – where you can almost ignore the couple tenths of a volt drop at low current.

Just in case the (really good) explanations above don’t make sense yet – I’ll expand a bit. The circuit is a simple voltage divider between the +5V bus and ground. You can usually ignore the input current to the microcontroller as insignificant. For instance, a PIC micro I use on a robotic vehicle – PIC18F4580 – draws only about 1uA to each input when digital I/O’s are set as inputs.

All I did was add a resistance to your 15K so that the percentage of resistance that the 15K makes up of the total (between +5V and ground) is less than around 10%. Since the voltage “dropped” across each part of the series resistor string will be proportional to the percentage of the total resistance, I made sure the total resistance was more than 150K ohms, so that the voltage across the 15K part would be less than 10% of the total. Bringing the added resistance up to 200K was to compensate for diode drop – but it wasn’t calculated precisely. You’ll find with experience that resistors aren’t typically selected for a precise value – except when used in a divider to set an exact voltage. They’re more often selected to set up a reasonable current in a circuit - maybe a mA or two for low-signal circuits – and selected for standardized values that can be pulled off the shelf.