Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Gen 2 Electronics

This has been sitting in the draft box for 12 months because the Lexan got destroyed in a storm so I never got to implement the whole system.

A side goal of Gen 2 is to make the electronics a little cleaner and easier to deal with.  So I found some really nice perf board at work and cut a small piece to make a shield for the Arduino.


 Bottom of the board.  Tried to be a clean as possible.  Have a great soldering iron really helps, I used the professional Welder at work.  Compared to the work, I did last time with my fat tipped one this is amazingly clean.
Top of the board, has connectors for 4  2 pin sensors and a 6 pin header for the relay board.

 Last time around I created this crazy sensor stalk.  It had all of the sensors going into a 8 pin header I think.  It was a mess to solder and dealing with placing the sensors in the system was a pain.  This time around each sensor is discrete and has heat shrink  and a crimped two pin connector.

The whole system put together with the Open Squid.  I used an old 4 pin cd-rom audio cable(is a tad bit too long) for the 4 IO lines and a 2 pin jumper for 5V and Ground.

I will need to add the transistor circuit for the 12V fan.  There should be enough to add this to the bottom of the shield.