Risky
20th August 2004, 15:38
I've been thinking for a while aboult building a bit of an I/O capacity so I can get some more monitoring on for the PC. I'm keep to build in flow, pressure, current, voltage, temperature sensing if I can.
Now waht this comes down to getting A/D and counter readings and the best approach I can find is using Dallas 1-wire devices (http://para.maxim-ic.com/1Wire.htm). You can run this out of a Serial or USB port with the appropriate adaptor and then there's APIs (http://www.ibutton.com/software/tmex/) to take reading and run things. It works quite neatly as each device has a unique ID so you can have a whole load of different sensors on a single line.
What I was hoping to do was tomaybe get a few temp sensors (easy DS1820 family) and then add a flow meter - using a counter and move on to using A/D readings to get some more interesting measuring by way of current transducers (to get the power consuption of the PSU or Pump) and maybe pressure transducers to take a look at the water circuit.
You can also wet output on the same system with GIOs and even a digital pot for D/A work. Again all on the same line so the hardware side could be fairly simple.
the problem here is that these are fairly miniturized devices - TSOC and similar- I'm not sure how easy is going to be to work things for the likes of me. The advantage is that there isn't too much electronics to do and with a few 1-wire chips (say a quad A/D, Dual Counter 8way GIO) on a board you have a very flexible I/O system. Any thermometers and pots would be in TO-92 and the whole lot has to be chained together keeping the spurs as short as possible.
Now I wondering if our resident electronics experts have any idea if I'm on the wrong track here and whether I should be thinking of getting a PCB made up for this project rather than messing around on veroboard?
Now waht this comes down to getting A/D and counter readings and the best approach I can find is using Dallas 1-wire devices (http://para.maxim-ic.com/1Wire.htm). You can run this out of a Serial or USB port with the appropriate adaptor and then there's APIs (http://www.ibutton.com/software/tmex/) to take reading and run things. It works quite neatly as each device has a unique ID so you can have a whole load of different sensors on a single line.
What I was hoping to do was tomaybe get a few temp sensors (easy DS1820 family) and then add a flow meter - using a counter and move on to using A/D readings to get some more interesting measuring by way of current transducers (to get the power consuption of the PSU or Pump) and maybe pressure transducers to take a look at the water circuit.
You can also wet output on the same system with GIOs and even a digital pot for D/A work. Again all on the same line so the hardware side could be fairly simple.
the problem here is that these are fairly miniturized devices - TSOC and similar- I'm not sure how easy is going to be to work things for the likes of me. The advantage is that there isn't too much electronics to do and with a few 1-wire chips (say a quad A/D, Dual Counter 8way GIO) on a board you have a very flexible I/O system. Any thermometers and pots would be in TO-92 and the whole lot has to be chained together keeping the spurs as short as possible.
Now I wondering if our resident electronics experts have any idea if I'm on the wrong track here and whether I should be thinking of getting a PCB made up for this project rather than messing around on veroboard?