Update...been focusing on getting some basic carrier boards done and writing code leveraging flash to perform and record results of tests as I progress.
Here is a summary of the boards I have created which are kind of general purpose so may be of use to someone else's project (if so, Merry Christmas). I am no EE so these are pretty basic just using eagle light and auto router mostly. I have done basic functional test on each one. The documentation and picture of each of the boards can be found at
http://www.rcpylonracing.com/page4/page10/page10.htmlFirst is the board that will be used for the judge ground, lap counter and starter ground station. Its called MoteinoPylon2and3Judge but will be used for multiple stations that just need a bunch of inputs for buttons and switches.
The board has the following functions:
- Footprint for Moteino R4.
- Footprint for soldering on a single cell lipo charger I like to use from adafruit (
http://www.adafruit.com/product/1905) (don't need to use, you could just solder your power input of choice to the BAT/GND pads).
- Set up for a power switch to cut off power.
- Voltage divider into A0 to allow monitoring of voltage of power source
- Brings out D3-D7 and A1-A3 for digital inputs using internal pullups for 8 potential inputs via switches and buttons.
- A six pin header to match the pins of the adafruit i2c OLED 128x32 display (
http://www.adafruit.com/products/931). I find this a versatile display that can display a lot of information in a small space and is readable in daylight. This could be used for some other i2c if you wire into appropriate pads from your i2c device. I am going to use it for an RTC instead of display on some.
.... gotta go check on the Christmas Turkey, so I'll complete this post later...Merry Christmas.
Turkey is doing fine....
Pylon 1 Light Ground Unit:
- Also has Moteino R4 footprint, power switch, voltage divider, lipo charger and i2c OLED foot print as above.
- Has 8 channel Darlington Driver ULN2803
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/312 I use this to turn on any one of the four lights at pylon 1 by completing the circuit to ground. I am ganging up two channels for each light because they each draw about 400ma which is at the limit of individual channel capacity and since I only needed 4 and this allow for ganging up, I went that route.
- Voltage divider into A1 to monitor voltage of source that is powering the lights. The lights in my case our these which are visible in broad daylight from 500 feet. They are bus light turn signals.
https://www.superbrightleds.com/moreinfo/truck-round-lamps/round-led-bus-tail-lights-7in-led-stop-turn-tail-light-with-61-leds/566/- Footprint for tmp36 temperature sensor
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10988. My lights should only have a duty cycle of about 15% but thought it would be good to monitor temperature of Darlington to make sure I wasn't overheating it. So I threw this on there. Foot print is actually incorrect so you can't push it all the way to board which is okay for my purposes because I plan to bend the leds so its lays on top of the Darlington.
- I beefed up the tracks for the source of the ground line for the lights and the outputs of the Darlington since they'll be carrying around 400 ma each.
Finally the Starter Display Arduino Shield:
- I am using the following DMD from Freetronics (
http://www.freetronics.com.au/products/dot-matrix-display-32x16-red#.VJyS0MAAA). In the basic Arduino/Xbee system I made last year, it worked really well. Very bright and versatile. It is all set to work with Arduino Uno. including a special connector that plugs into Arduino Uno. I messed around a little with trying to get it to work with Moteino but not set up to be 3.3v friendly and only officially support Uno (have a beta for others). So I decided to create a Arduino Moteino shield. The Moteino and Arduino talk to each other via I2C using a level converter (
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11955). This offloads the updating and refreshing of the display to Arduino.
- Has the voltage divider and I2C OLED header as above.
- Note I started with an Arduino shield eagle part that is the old style that doesn't have the additional IOREF, SCL, SDA pins brought out that the new or the ISCP 6 pin header that the new footprint does, but easily modified to add if you want those.
- Joe.