This is just a quick post at the moment because the project isn’t done and I am distracted by other things… The thermostat for the central heater in my house became unreliable a week or two ago. My wife rang around and a new one from the manufacturer of the heater was going to be…
Category: Arduino
Building a hygrometer with a HS1101
The next sensor I wanted to add to my home was a set of hygrometers. Specifically I wanted an exterior one, and a matching interior one. This would be useful as we have evaporative cooling, and if the humidity level outside is already high, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put extra…
The Beer Fridge saga continues
Since the last update on the beer fridge, we’ve had to do some murdering of the original PCB to get it to fit in a case. In addition, we’d failed to take into account the startup power draw for the compressor (5 amps), and had to upgrade the relay we’re using from a 3 amp…
Thinking about arduino as a prototyping platform
So, I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about arduino projects that I consider the arduino to be a prototyping platform, and a damn good one at that. Hack a day seems to think of it in similar terms. It was really Doug who got be thinking in this direction with the initial PCB design for the…
Arduino with the kids: Cricket Noise Door Bell
When I was a child, I had a doorbell at my bedroom door to ward off uninvited guests. My six year old, Matthew, has always been pretty enthused about building things, and so he wanted to give an electronics project a try. I thought this would be a good project to start out with for…
Beer fridge controller 0.3
Last night Doug made up the first cut of the PCB for the beer fridge controller mentioned in previous posts, and we fitted the arduino to it. There wasn’t much in the way of software changes, apart from changing the pin that the compressor runs on. You can see here that we’ve mounted both the…
Beer fridge controller 0.2
Further to yesterday’s post about the beer fridge thermostat replacement, I’ve been hacking on ethernet support for the controller. This is handy because I’d like to log the temperature and compressor state over the network, because I’m hoping that can be used to make calculations about the thermal mass of the contents of the fridge,…
Beer fridge controller 0.1
On the weekend I picked up a 220 liter beer fridge for $20. Its in really good condition (ignoring some minor rust in the freezer section), and the only real problem with it is that the thermostat doesn’t work leaving the compressor on the whole time. Doug suggested that instead of just buying a new…