I was always amazed with the beauty of all kind of DIY electronics enclosed somehow with acrylic glass. For my first acrylic-boxed project instead of using some of the laser cutting services available, I found really neat and simple laser-cut acrylic project case kit, cheap and easy to assemble: (http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Sick-Of-Beige-Basic-Case-v1-DP8049-p-1322.html?cPath=55_60) with board template for Eagle PCB software. The project PCB is sandwiched between two laser cut acrylic plates, held together with standoffs and screws. Great. But what electronics to put in that sandwich? Actually an entry point for the project was huge and bright, white, cool looking 4 digit 7 segment LED display from Sparkfun https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11409 which I wanted to "sandwiched" with acrylic. But what to display on it? Well, an idea was to build some kind of USB gadget, a notebook gadget, something to put on the desk or maybe on the top of the notebook screen so I thought it would be nice to display temperature in your computer room or work place or whatever environment. So I used a great Maxim's temperature sensor DS18B20 in waterproof stainless steel tube encapsulation (http://www.goodluckbuy.com/-waterproof-digital-thermal-probe-or-sensor-ds18b20-new.html):
On schematic there is nothing special, I used PIC16F628 with internal oscillator. DS18B20 data pin is connected to RA1 pin. Unused pins are available on the connector JP5 on the schematic. There is also a ICSP connector - it was on the right side of the board on the first board release, I repositioned it on near the bottom edge in the second board release - I prefer using pogo pins adapter for programming rather then soldering header pins... There is also a place for reset button ...
plexi_temp_02.pdf |
Iteadstudio made boards for me (two following pictures are revision 02 of the board. Prototype on the pictures is made on the first version of the board which has some minor errors fixed in revision 02 with some layout changes also) :
Coding is done in MikroC Pro for PIC compiler from Mikroelektronika and it's very simple.
In the following revisions I plan to add humidity measurement and MAX7219 for driving display because I have some anoying flickering due to multiplexing...
To be continued soon, I hope...
In the following revisions I plan to add humidity measurement and MAX7219 for driving display because I have some anoying flickering due to multiplexing...
To be continued soon, I hope...