Arduino and DS18B20 - 1-wire digital thermometer | Ogalik
Finally got this DS18B20 working. Actually three of them. And in two modes. Starting with the main mode, three wires are needed, as this sensor has three pins. Works with three wires, as seen on the following illustration. Parasite mode eliminates one wire. Maybe following illustration helps. Of course multiple DS18B20-s or different one wire devices can connected together like so: Here comes the beauty of using digital thermometers. Some words of caution: No pins on DS18B20 should be left unconnected. Software? DS18B20 can also be installed outside. Working with three DS18B20 thermometers for a year now – sometimes those thermometers do not get initialized correctly. Related posts:
Looking at the Arduino for use in the Industrial Automation | ATS TechLab
A few weeks ago, I purchased an DFRobot mega (Arduino mega 1280 clone) and an LCD display from Freeduino.eu, a few days later I also bought an ethernet shield (mega compatible) and a few components. This purchase also resulted in an additional free of charge Arduino Uno. I bought the Arduino to find out if it is usable in industrial automation projects. My current setup (see image) is a learning environment able to measure temperature and light intensity and it controls an RGB LED. The ethernet shield helps me sharing the measurements using a webserver. The Arduino platform is not expensive, the programming environment is for free and you only need 27,50 euro for an Arduino Uno, a USB A->B cable and an LED. The setup shown above will be split soon, the Uno and the ethernet shield will monitor my energy, gas and water consumption at home and the mega will be used by a few co-workers to see if it is usable for one of their projects.
Home energy data logging project
Yesterday I saw that onterio will be increasing the electric bills 46% over the next 5 years as they phase out coal and go renewable. We don't have coal to phase out but are expecting similar increases in the future. The city recently announced millions in water infrastructure updates and they will be billing that not through property taxes but on water usage. In both cases the more you use the worse the hit will be. So today I decided it's time to get off my *** and get really serious about consumption logging and reduction. Water wise we discovered a break in the main on the cities side of the meter so they'll be digging that out and fixing it shortly. Anyways since I want to do data logging and realtime monitoring of our usage today I ordered an arduino mega microcontroller kit off of ebay. That is a good start to let me know what is going on beyond what my kill a watt can tell me. This should be fun.
BoardEthernet
Overview The Arduino Ethernet is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins, 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a RJ45 connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. NB: Pins 10, 11, 12 and 13 are reserved for interfacing with the Ethernet module and should not be used otherwise. An optional Power over Ethernet module can be added to the board as well. The Ethernet differs from other boards in that it does not have an onboard USB-to-serial driver chip, but has a Wiznet Ethernet interface. An onboard microSD card reader, which can be used to store files for serving over the network, is accessible through the SD Library. The 6-pin serial programming header is compatible with the USB Serial adapter and also with the FTDI USB cables or with Sparkfun and Adafruit FTDI-style basic USB-to-serial breakout boards. The Revision 3 of the board introduces the standardized 1.0 pinout, that consist in: Summary Power VIN. Memory
FTDI Basic Breakout - 5V
Description: This is the newest revision of our FTDI Basic. We now use a SMD 6-pin header on the bottom, which makes it smaller and more compact. Functionality has remained the same. This is a basic breakout board for the FTDI FT232RL USB to serial IC. The pins labeled BLK and GRN correspond to the colored wires on the FTDI cable. This board has TX and RX LEDs that make it a bit better to use over the FTDI cable. This board was designed to decrease the cost of Arduino development and increase ease of use (the auto-reset feature rocks!). One of the nice features of this board is a jumper on the back of the board that allows the board to be configured to either 3.3V or 5V (both power output and IO level). Documents:
Dangerous Prototypes | A new open source hardware project every month
USB + Serial Backpack Kit with 16x2 RGB backlight negative LCD [RGB on Black] ID: 784 - $24.95 : Adafruit Industries
Adding a character display to your project or computer has never been easier with the new Adafruit USB or TTL serial backpack! This custom-designed PCB sits on the back of our 'standard' character LCD (16x2 or 20x4 sized) and does everything you could want: printing text, automatic scrolling, setting the backlight, adjusting contrast, making custom characters, turning on and off the cursor, etc. It can even handle our RGB backlight LCDs with full 8-bit PWM control of the backlight. Inside the backpack is an USB-capable AT90USB162 chip that listens for commands both a mini-B USB port and a TTL serial input wire. The command interface is compatible with the popular "Matrix Orbital" specifications so this backpack will work perfectly with computer applications or libraries that are expecting a "Matrix" LCD such as "LCD Smartie". This mini-kit comes with three parts: the Adafruit USB+Serial LCD backpack and a single 16x2 RGB negative backlight LCD, and a strip of header.
List of 39 Low Cost Linux Friendly Boards and Products
Dmitry (omgfire), one of my awesome readers, compiled a great tabular list of Linux friendly boards and products that sells for less than $300 US (usually less than $200). This list includes technical details such as the processor, GPU, memory, NAND flash, connectivity, ports, supported Linux distributions… as well as availability and pricing information. There are currently 39 Linux devices in total. The vast majority are ARM based boards, but he also included 2 x86 products by VIA, but those are relatively pricey ($265 and up). Here’s a summary list with SoCs used, links to blog posts and product pages (if available), as well as price information. Raspberry Pi Board Model B Beaglebone Snowball PDK Lite The list is obviously not exhaustive (this would include hundreds of boards), but this still pretty good. You can download Dmitry’s PDF file that shows side-by-side comparison of 5 devices at a time.
Non-blocking Operations on Arduino | www.quilix.com
No stinkin' library needed.... I'm using the term 'blocking' a little loosely here. In Arduino-land... I'm talking about delay(). // ... from the Arduino Blink Sketchvoid loop() { digitalWrite( led, HIGH ); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level) delay( 1000 ); // wait for a second digitalWrite( led, LOW ); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW delay( 1000 ); // wait for a second} "While it is easy to create a blinking LED with the delay() function, and many sketches use short delays for such tasks as switch debouncing, the use of delay() in a sketch has significant drawbacks. If you're new to Arduino, you might not realize just how badly delays can impact performance. If you need more mileage... structs + PROGMEM can be used to expand this approach to cover dozens of specialized operations without eating-up precious kilobytes.
