Arduino and Cake
Contents
Arduino and Cake
This is a page of information for the (hopefully) regular 'Arduino and Cake' event we run at Makespace. This is an evening where we get together in the space to learn and hack on projects involving the Arduino and similar microcontrollers. As the name suggests, there's also cake!
Sessions
We've had one session, with all levels of experience from complete novices to expert embedded programmers. Everyone paired up, with beginners and experts working together; judging from the happy buzz of making noises (both the noise of making, and the making of noises - we had buzzers!) it worked pretty well. The meetup page for the first go is on meetup here
The plan is to have this as regularly as possible, varying the day around in case people can't make a particular day of the week. The second one will be next Thursday (the 8th of August); you can sign up here.
Helpful links
Arduino home page : www.arduino.cc
Projects
Got an interesting project or a project idea? Add it here.
Vehicle monitor / heating controller
I've re-wired my Land Rover, using a star topology, with a big central "ganglion" which almost all the wires run to and from. There's an extra wire coming from each connection, that will go to a board of LEDs and voltage dividers, the latter feeding into an Arduino Mega, which will monitor just about everything, and display information on a small LCD panel.
I'm also planning to make a motorized heater control system (moving flaps to direct air from an Eberspacher) and the valve motors will be driven from relays on the Arduino.
And there'll be a GPS/GSM security unit, and eventually a Linux board (probably Pandaboard) running navigation software. And later on, I hope, an electric motor to drive the extra axle I added. The Arduino Mega will route data between all these points, with its multiple hardware UARTS, as well as sending out information it converts locally from its own inputs.
I expect the software will be a main loop that polls all UARTs for incoming information, all wiring lines for changes from their previous state, all heating valve position sensors for whether they've reached the right position, all pedals for information to send to the traction motor controller when fitted, and does the associated actions (for example, NMEA sentences from the GPS get forwarded to the Linux board for navigation and are also used to display the time on the LCD, heating switches update the desired positions for flap valves).
JCGS 15:00, 2 August 2013 (BST)
