Arduino Development Thread

[Zizzle]

Been a while since I caught up on this thread.

If anyone is considering a new design, then I would recommend getting away from the 16x2 LCDs. They look like crap and don't display much.

Chinese 320x240 colour LCDs are super cheap on ebay.

Look at this, stm32 dev board with 2.8" touch screen LCD for < $30 delivered.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/STM32F103RBT6-deve...=item3a68965ee7

GPIO is broken out and these ARM cpus have more than enough grunt.

I have a FreeRTOS software stack on github that works with the LCD and touch screen on the boards that I have.

 

[vortex]

Looks good. Could be worth a look.

 

[Edak]

Thank you but this is an Arduino thread.
You can get all that development stuff at DealExtreme cheap, maybe even cheaper.

 

[Zizzle]

LOL Arduino police are here to lock down the thread. No one mention anything else. In a thread that started years before the police even joined the forum. :lol:

 

[Edak]

LOL Arduino police are here to lock down the thread. No one mention anything else. In a thread that started years before the police even joined the forum. :lol:

LOL. Zizzle call me police but keeping on topic you are thread hijacking.

 

[bonj]

:lol:

Oh the humanity!

Since I started the thread way back when, I can say that the original intention of the thread was to encourage home development of brewing equipment. This thread was actually forked off from Zizzle's original brewbot thread because we started cluttering it up with general development talk. I have no issue with Zizzle's post.

 

[Edak]

The fact of the matter is that Arduino development is within the grasp of many home-brewers who have no other electronic/programming knowledge. ARM programming is much more sophisticated, requires a large learning curve and has less of a community surrounding it, therefore it is less suitable for this forum. I am not precious about Arduino, my issue was mainly the "...They look like crap..." comment, which suggests that the designs that people are currently working on are inferior whereas really they are just simplistic.

I am fully into development on other platforms, but I still like an open source and easy to develop platform such as Arduino because it is more accessible.

My 2c, wasn't trying to start a flame war.

 

[vortex]

Zizzles post prompted me to investigate the ST range of boards; and it's pretty well as suggested by Edak - it's not as community oriented as Arduino, and not as electronics newb friendly (important to me) due to the smaller community (IMO).

One board that looked good, however, was the Maple board which is intentionally built to be a lot like Arduino (uses the IDE as an example, and is mostly pin-compatible), and I'm tempted to pick one or two up to have a look. But, like always, I need to remind myself to finish the project's I have on the go right now before looking at new ones!

For my needs, Arduino suits what I want to do perfectly, though a 20 x 4 I2C LCD would be a nice upgrade - particularly when I look at HLT/RIMS/Pump control.

Personally if I want a more powerful platform I would probably look at Raspberry Pi.

 

[bonj]

I kind of agree on the raspberry pi.

But I don't mind the HD44780 LCDs. They nice and cheap, easy to implement and easy to read. I'm kind of against increasing complexity for no good reason.

 

[glenwal]

Wouldn't the cheapest and eaisest way to get a nice touchscreen interface onto something like this be with an ethernet shield and a cheap android tablet.


You can get 7" tablets for around the $60 mark now days.

 

[Malted]

What about an Arduino Fart-O-Meter?

 

[Zizzle]

What about an Arduino Fart-O-Meter?

Gold! On topic and all!

This thread has always had people discussing control options, from Windows based PCs, RasPis, PicAxe you name it. And the options are always changing. A new raft of ARM Cortex CPUs are just coming out. Some even in DIP packaging.

BTW you can pre-order the TI ARM lanchpad board for $5, bargain. http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-lm4f120xl

The problem with the RasberryPI is the limited I/O available. Why spend money on extra boards to get to I/O when you get a cheaper board with I/O already?

7" tablet has the problem less - you don't need pins for display I/O just pump/heat control. But the form factor may not be great. 2-3" LCDs fit in a project box nicely.

With the ST touch boards all the display is already wired. No need for push buttons / knobs of the outside of the box. Just the touch LCD. No need to abbreviate text, or try to scroll 16x2 chars. Can actually do nice graphics instead of hacked characters.

Sure the tool chain complexity is a little higher - but also comes with more power (a decent debugging story). I'm sure most people building the Matho/Bonj controller don't really hack on the code - so you only need a couple of people to run the toolchain and do the hacking.

 

[Zizzle]

Saw this go past in the feed the other day. Food grade heat shrink.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/14/ne...ameter-12-long/

Could be useful.

 

[bonj]

Saw this go past in the feed the other day. Food grade heat shrink.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/14/ne...ameter-12-long/

Could be useful.

Awesome find, Zizzle! That could be very useful....

 

[kymba]

hey i've just grabbed some heatshrink from the local jaycar with the intent of waterproofing some ds18b20's

one was just the standard clear heatshrink material listed in the catalogue is 'Polyolefin' and states that it is alright to 120 degrees

the other was in a packet and had bold writing stating that it was made from "polyvinylidene fluoride" http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=WH5526. A quick search reveals that this stuff is used as a beverage filtering membrane so should be ok for wort

 

[vortex]

I don't know about you blokes but I'll stick to a stainless thermowell that doesn't mind an overnight PBW soak with the rest of the fermenter

 

[bonj]

I don't know about you blokes but I'll stick to a stainless thermowell that doesn't mind an overnight PBW soak with the rest of the fermenter

totally, but for other applications, food grade shrink tubing is a good thing to have available..

kymba: anything with "vinyl" in the name scares me for food contact at higher temperatures.

 

[vortex]

Not Arduino related, but I just ordered a BeagleBone SBC for my RIMS brewery build. They're a lot like the Raspberry Pi except they have a massive number of GPIO pins (silly amount of pins v's 8 on the RasPi), native Ethernet (not a USB device like RasPi), 256mb DDR2 RAM. Comes with an Embedded Linux distro (Angstrom), plus there are others that can be installed. Basically a BeagleBoard slimmed down to its basic hardware. Not as many shields available as there are for Arduino, but it's only been out around 12 months.

http://beagleboard.org/bone
http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design/
http://www.adafruit.com/products/513

More expensive than the RasPi, it will be total overkill for what I'm doing, but there's nothing like overkill

 

[Feldon]

Stepping way outside of my skill set posting in this thread, but noticed this announcement a few days ago re an open source gizmo for controlling/logging fermentation called BrewPi.

Thought you blokes might be interested.

"BrewPi is an open source fermentation controller that runs on an Arduino (for now) and a Raspberry Pi. It can control your beer temperature with 0.1 degree precision, log temperature data in nice graphs and is fully configurable from a web interface."

http://brewpi.com/brewpi-released-all-sour...racker-lets-go/

 

[Ronin]

Anyone seen this?

http://www.freetronics.com/pages/jaycar-water-flow-gauge

I'm thinking of putting one on the outlet of my mash tun so I know how much water has gone into the mash.