| Beer fridge controller 0.3 |
Last night Doug made up the first cut of the PCB for the beer fridge controller mentioned in previous posts, and we fitted the arduino to it. There wasn't much in the way of software changes, apart from changing the pin that the compressor runs on.
You can see here that we've mounted both the arduino and the Ethernet shield onto the PCB -- this is just temporary until we get the PCB right. The black rectangle at the front right is a 240 volt capable relay, and the thing behind it is a 240 volt transformer which is capable of powering all the electronics on the boards. In the final PCB we wont need the arduino at all -- just the Ethernet shield and the atmega 328 from the arduino. However, that didn't work out this time around because of problems getting the Ethernet socket to fit nicely. Its clearer on this picture of the other side of the board:
See how we had to cut a hole in the PCB for the socket? That took out some of the pin holes for the atmega, and a few tracks. Its not a big problem because we're going to iterate a little on the PCB design (and by "we", I mean Doug). You can also see the perspex shield, which covers all the 240 volt rails, which is a nice touch. This version of the hardware is now sitting out on top of the beer fridge, and I wrote some simple scraping and visualization software for the temperature values I am seeing from the embedded hardware. You can see here the temperatures out the back of my house for this afternoon:
As I've mentioned before, the hardware and software can handle more than one temperature probe, so the ultimate plan is to take the opportunity to place a bunch of these probes around the house and see what interesting data we end up with.
Tags for this post: arduino arduino temperature 1-wire beer ethernet homeautomation
Related posts: Beer fridge controller 0.2; The Beer Fridge saga continues; Beer fridge controller 0.1; Building a hygrometer with a HS1101; Home power measurement; Adding Open Flash Charts to my home monitoring; Thermostat (or, its happening again); Phoenix for business; Thinking about arduino as a prototyping platform; Arduino with the kids: Cricket Noise Door Bell; Coffee and beer in one glass; The many uses of the word Bellevue; An awesome weekend; Australian public service announcement; Surprise for the day: Australian beer is cheaper in the US than in Australia
posted at: 02:05 | path: /arduino | permanent link to this entry
Comment on this post.