Recently, a reader contacted this project's author with the following query:

I would like to be able to establish the beat rate of various musical tracks on CDs. I have made many enquiries but without success, apart from one company who suggested it could cost about 5,000 UK Pounds to develop a suitable circuit. Can you help?

In fact there are many other situations that could benefit from beat counting - keyboard typing rates, for example; rowing rates for another; counting objects passed a point, and so forth.So this constructional article presents a PIC-microcontrolled design that will monitor the timing of all sorts of events. The results are displayed on an alphanumeric liquid crystal display (LCD).