Toys for the Boys - for Christmas!

[KenB]

Guys,

Want something to tinker with over Christmas, avoid the family and the repeats on TV?

Here's a very tinkerable microcontroller board that is programmed from your PC's USB port. The hardware and software is open source so its very cheap and with a rapidly expanding community behind it.

It's generically known as the Arduino  (Italian for cash cow  ) but there's a UK company in Middsx banging them out very cheaply, with their fully compatible clone called the Freeduino.

http://www.nuelectronics.com/estore/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1

What can it do?

6 Analogue inputs for temperature sensing etc
Lots of digital outputs for driving relays, one wire, serial, etc
Easy to connect to prototypes and breadboards and develop your own applications
Can serve realtime data onto the internet using its dirt cheap (£12.99) Ethernet Shield
Could form the basis of your next renewable energy monitoring station
Electricity or gas meter monitoring  http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/65
Ever-growing Arduino community out there to give you help and advice
Lots of useful examples, documentation and access to open source projects
At £13 each you buy as many as your system needs
Better than watching "Sound of Music"
Works with Mac, Linux and Windoze

If like me, you haven't really programmed anything since BASIC lost its line numbers, this could be just the introduction you need to programming in C. 

Face it - if you can no longer see the components you are trying to solder onto a board - it may be time to retrain as a software engineer.

Anyone using these already?


Ken

[Paulh_Boats]

Engineers with dodgy eyesight - I know when I'm being tracked down. 

A good find Ken. Lets kick around some ideas and then a poll of pet projects.

1 - Rainwater pump controller

2 - Automagical watering for greenhouse

3 - One stop monitor for PV/battery volts, solar temperatures and house power consumption (if Ken can crack the wireless protocols)

4 - Automatic LED lights when mains fails

Any more?    I know what Ivan wants. 

[Paulh_Boats]

I had a look at the software support - the dogs doo-dahs:  one wire temperature monitoring, X10 control over mains, interface to PC keyboard, LCD display, interface to cheap wireless controllers including X10

A great package for clever renewable stuff.


Ken - I think we should move this to Other Areas and let people know what can be done. Its an ideal modular system for forum members to collaborate. If you buy one I'll buy one! Any other takers?

[fje-iptelenet]

Me too please..... Haven't done C programming for 5 years.

[insolare]

There's some more UK arduino stuff available here....

http://tinker.it/ukstore/index.php

[stephend]

I plan to use a number of these on an off grid house + still-in-planning olive grove in spain.  Initial ideas are:
- Use 1 arduino in the power shed to measure current draw and calculate overproduction of energy, then turn on a deep well pump based on this.
- Use another arduino as a remote weather station to measure soil moisture and insolation to control watering.
- Use more arduino's as remote switching and sensor solutions if the need arises

I really like the fact that you can easily network them together wirelessly using the ZigBee boards - and of course connect any number of remote Arduino's to a central PC also using ZigBee.  This lets you do all the fancy data logging and web serving from a powerful (relatively) PC, and data gathering and switching from Arduino.

A company in Zaragoza (just down the road from me) has bundled the board +zigbee wireless+ solar panels + battery + sensors into a neat unit to be used as an autonomous sensing station, see:
http://www.libelium.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=60

[EDIT:] Mmmm, looks like the solar charger and module are actually optional add-on bits and don't come with the main unit:
http://www.libelium.com/tienda/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=67

[cornishben]

I'll buy one!
Am keen to connect my new currentcost energy monitor up to one with the ethernetshield, for recording real-time/historical electrical consumption on t'internet. In order to get hourly data out of the currentcost you have to download data at least every 26hrs, so having a dedicated M/C running to do this sounds good.

This guys talks a bit about it here>>
http://knolleary.net/tag/arduino

(as an aside - spent last weekend tinkering with my new meter trying to get historical data out - turned out they'd sent the old version by mistake!)

I guess monitoring thermal store temps could be done with my existing TDC3 temp sensors, just wiring them out in parallel to this box as well as the TDC3

my C is pretty rudimentary, but as you say its open-source and theres plenty of help/info out there - can we get a joblot on the cheap

one other thought is some kind of washing machine hack for 'coldfill only' models like ours.. but as discussed on here you'd need info about your particular model and when it heats water in its cycle and when it uses cold to rinse

and another thought.. if you could hack into the wireless protocol for those switch the mains on/off socket things then you could automate the switching on/off of mains powered stuff. I'd like to be able to control our immersion heater remotely, ie switch it on remotely when on the way home and wanting a bath but realising its been cloudy all day - or a more accurate method to switch it off when the store reaches temp (rather than using the built-in thermostat). Or turning on the CH remotely via GSM phone?

[Ted]

I've been wanting to get into this for a while and the wife did ask me yesterday what I wanted for Christmas!

C isn't the only option, there is some support for Ruby (that is compiled via C) which would probably be easier to code. http://rad.rubyforge.org/

It's about 10 years since I did any C programming.

[Paulh_Boats]

 stephend

Those look like great applications and linking them together wirelessly is cool. SD cards are less than a pint so 1GB of storage is practical.

It would be great if the forum could sort of collaborate on the open-source Arduino's - where are you wookey and all the other data grabbers?  


I have experimented in the past with a PIC Ethernet board for temperature logging but it was a bit too ambitious (eggs in one basket architecture) and now I prefer the Lego approach of Arduino. Lego was always my favourite toy as a kid!

-Paul

[Paulh_Boats]

I've been wanting to get into this for a while and the wife did ask me yesterday what I wanted for Christmas!

C isn't the only option, there is some support for Ruby (that is compiled via C) which would probably be easier to code. http://rad.rubyforge.org/

It's about 10 years since I did any C programming.

Ted,
Ruby could work well, but the Arduino C is fairly easy to pick up...... especially if you have been a professional programmer like myself for the last 28 years...just kidding. There are plenty of LED flashing tutorials to ease you back into programming and open-source opens the lid on creativity and sharing.


Cornishben
Cold fill fix - now there is a good idea. At the start press the button which for 3 minutes opens the hot valve - which you can scrounge from a scrap machine. Or Ivans variation that dumps the hot pipe into drain for 25 seconds to purge the cold water before starting the cycle...so that hot/cold machines fill with hottest water possible.

[KenB]

Paul, Ben

Some good ideas.

I think an important step would be to interface an SD card to the Arduino for dirt cheap mass storage. Then you have the basis of a great little multichannel datalogger. 

I believe (correct me if I am wrong) that one way is to make a single FAT16 file on the SD card - because there is not enough RAM on the Arduino to maintain a full FAT file structure.  Perhaps you will know more about this?  You can then pull the card out from the Arduino and read its contents onto the PC for processing and display.

The code for SD to ATmega168 is on the net, and I believe that there has been a porting to the Arduino - discussed here:

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1206874649

With the code available here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?2belzmmnzml


I want to try and get my gas meter wired up for optical digit zero sensing.  I built an opto reflective sensor on a scrap of veroboard a couple of years ago which was quite successful.  With the Arduino now available there is more of an incentive to get it done and get pulse counting and gas datalogging.

GSM for remote control.   Easily done if you use a GSM modem and an Arduino to interpret the serial output.  I have a friend who has a stock of over 200 surplus GSM modems, and we are quite close to wiring one up to an Arduino and getting it to parse an SMS text message.  (He's got this working with a PIC - but I have recently defected to the other side).

Wireless - the Xbee (Zigbee) modules are gaining quite a following - but are still a bit costly for domestic systems.  Most consumer equipment still uses 433MHz because it is very cheap, but not particularly secure.  The wireless switched sockets (eg Lidl) use such a poor coding, that a whiff of 433MHz from a neighbours doorbell or car keyfob will usually cause them to turn off.

Finally - I gave some thought to cabling systems - for supplying low voltage power to distributed devices, one wire sensors and for sending serial data or controlling.  The humble 6 pin RJ11 telephone extension cable sprung to mind as they are very cheap (<£1 for 10m from Farnell) and can handle a few hundred mA of current.  If you avoid the centre 2 pins you are less likely to connect a 50V phone line into your latest project.  I think this would be cheaper than CAT5.



Ken

[KenB]

Paul, List

Regarding a reduced FAT for the Arduino/SD interface - this will be of interest  - uFAT

http://arduinonut.blogspot.com/2008/04/ufat.html

It allows up to 16 pre-named files with 8_3 format filenames.  This could be useful for a simple datalogger, writing to files such as  jan09gas.csv, feb09gas.csv etc

I know that some clever folks have devised a SD based bootloader (PIC unfortunately). Just plug in the SD and the mcu loads and boots from it.



Ken

[stephend]

Not sure I'd choose arduino for data logging, lack of proper storage could be a barrier.  Would prefer something higher powered like a gumstix pc: www.gumstix.com  ... but they are a bit pricey. How about an old netbook pc from ebay?  Think you can pickup the first gen Eee's for under a 100 quid. 

[lightfoot]

Dear Santa - I would like a new (to me) laptop for Christmas, to replace this old and tired one that's barely limping along and will now only run via the Ubuntu live CD - which is tedious, slow and keeps hanging/crashing.......the big hammer is looming 

.....but then again, I guess I do need some new socks   



Yo ho ho,

Lightfoot.

[Amy]

Or turning on the CH remotely via GSM phone?

Press 1 for heating
Press 2 for lights
Press 3 for.............Gin and Tonic