Traffic Lights usually contain three lamps: red, amber and green. Here is a small project wherein you can control the Traffic Light of a four way intersection using a single controller. Consider four roads ROAD A, B, C and D and their corresponding signals red, amber and green each represented by a LED. So in all there are 12 LED’s each of which is connected to a controller pin.

In this code the duration of all green signals are the same and the duration of all amber signals are same. This duration is defined by DURATION_GREEN which is 10 seconds and DURATION_AMBER which is 2 seconds.

For generating delay we will be using Timer 0 in 16 bit INTERRUPT mode to generate One second delay. We load TH0 & TL0 with a specific value & on every clock cycle TH0 & TL0 increments by 1 and when the TIMER overflows from FFFF to 0000 a Timer0 overflow flag is set & interrupt is generated.  The maximum delay that can be generated using TIMER 0 in any mode is 65535 clock cycles & since we are using 12MHz crystal the maximum delay is 65.535ms. But we require 1second delay. So we generate 50ms delay using TIMER 0 & when 20 such delays have been generated we come to know that one second has elapsed. So basically 0.05ms X 20 =1 second. So we use a RAM location “multiplier” load it with 20 and whenever the timer overflows the ram location multiplier is decremented by one. Thus when multiplier becomes zero we come to know that one second has elapsed.

Another RAM location “current_signal_duration” is used it contains the total number of seconds for which the current signal has to be turned ON. This RAM location is decremented every time  one second has elapsed so when current_signal_duration becomes zero we come to know that it’s time to Turn OFF the current signal and move to the next signal.