Posts with «stripduino» label

Pantry Light Demo

The pantry light is installed and working perfectly: I'll post code and circuit details eventually, not much to it though.
Jeff's Arduino Blog 06 Nov 18:24
arduino  capacitive touch  capsense  copper  pantry light  stripduino  

1-Day Project: Pantry Light

We have two pantries in our flat, one of which could use some light.

There's an outlet in there, but a simple solution won't do: I have more circuitry and time on my hands than I can handle, and the least I can do is make an over-complicated pantry light.

Parts lying around to use:

  • AC-DC converter blocks with screw-terminals outputting 12V at 2A. I have a bunch of these-- came with the LED strips.
  • A length of white LED strip.
  • Lots of TIP-120-style MOSFETs, intended for a second light suit. It's fun to have a lot of high power switches around.
  • Spare Arduino-compatible boards, including the "StripDuino" by "Tinkeract.com," here I quote the names since links go nowhere.
The idea is simple-- rest your hand on the large strip on the door sill as you scan the pantry contents. The light will turn on if you tap the strip, or it will fade if you leave your hand on it.

This design solves the problem uniquely with:

  1. Very large switch surface,
  2. Variable brightness by holding the switch,
  3. Indirect lighting from compact, dense LED strip tucked out of view.
I have a hardware sketch working in terms of the key elements of the controlling Arduino system:
  • Capacitive touch sensing works between pins D5 and D6 with a 1M resistor
  • Touch surface works: aluminum foil with soldered wire plus a layer of hot glue and tape.
  • PWM works with the MOSFET to control the LED strip nicely, with the board's 3.3V logic.
For the light strip at full power, I measure 240.8 mA at 11.85 V, so 2.85 W of power. This is not much but it scales proportionally to the length of the strip.

To do:

  1. Capture the working circuit in an Eagle schematic.
  2. Build a looping sketch with the tap/hold fading behavior.
More to come...

Jeff's Arduino Blog 27 Sep 22:11
arduino  capacitive touch  mosfet  pantry light  stripduino  

Spreadsheet Edits

I've made some changes to my Arduino-compatible boards spreadsheet lately: I added a few boards, removed boards which are no longer available, and made some general changes.

Added:
  • Stripduino by TinkerAct! has a small SMD area for its Arduino-compatible core, with IO pins in a line next to a stripboard area for on-board prototyping. There was an initial issue with the name of the board, but it seems straightened out now, and the design is lovely-- nothing extraneous. It reminds me of one of my favorite boards, Prototino by Spikenzie Labs.
  • "Drum Kit - Kit AI" by SpikenzieLabs, a "maybe not" Arduino-compatible board for creating a MIDI 6-pad drum kit using piezo sensors stuck to just about anything.
  • rEDI Education Board by Rogue Robotics is a prototyping board with buttons, LED's, a piezo speaker and volume knob, real time clock, high-powered 5V voltage regulator, servo headers, and a breadboard area. Also "maybe not" Arduino-compatible since it runs an ATmega644P, so it needs a custom bootloader.
Removed:
  • A bunch of boards by Fundamental Logic which apparently stopped accepting orders in May of 2010. That makes me sad since they offered some interesting boards, but thankfully the designs are still online for reference. My favorites: iDuino, StickDuino, MPGuino.
  • Modified Pico was a very compact, breadboard-friendly Duemilanove-compatible board. Thankfully details (including design files) are still available.
  • Rampage Robot Base V4 was an Arduino-powered robot platform with headers for a shield. Looks like its creator has moved on to more complex microcontrollers.
  • Zuccherino by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories was to be "a low-cost, scalable, and extremely versatile open-source motion control platform," but the project has not had an update in a while. I look forward to more from this project.
  • "Flexi" was an inexpensive breadboard-friendly clone, not sure what happened but the domain now hosts a useless/spammy link page.
Changes:
  • I just added a "By" column for designer, author or manufacturer. I'd like it to be simply "Author," but some companies [cough] mostly sell other peoples' designs, so I'm not sure whom to credit.
  • I'd like to add more information about when boards were edited or checked, but wading through the revision history in Google Docs is a pain. A few people have suggested this and I like the idea, but I can't figure out how to track down the details.
  • I updated a bunch of boards' links, prices, and chip; a few use ATmega328s but used to be ATmega168s.
As always, please email me with any suggestions or corrections!
Jeff's Arduino Blog 14 Feb 18:48
dkkai  drumkit  emsl  flexi  fundamental logic  iduino  mpguino  redi  spreadsheet  stickduino  stripduino  zuccherino