Heat Sensor?..

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
 
CHOMPERS said:
By the way, you guys are my newest best friends. Welcome to the Nerd Herd. :D
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:cheers:

CHOMPERS said:
Yeah, it's an addiction. All I have to say for myself is Arduino's are still cheaper than drugs or loose women.
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Very true. And its productive! At this point, I'm just adding stuff to my aquarium arduino project for kicks and giggles. Right now I have a planted 55 gallon. When I move to a bigger house I want ~200 gallon tank, so I'm kind of prototyping right now to see what I can get to work in preparation for future projects. I also do a lot of automotive stuff, and am starting to use some arduinos for that too. Getting the arduino to control 120V circuits is proving to be pretty difficult. Its the little details that end up causing the most issues.

I try to use the most recent R3 type of arduinos, they have a different USB driver chip which has worked much better for me. About 1 out of every 100 times I upload code to my arduino, it seems to corrupt my bootloader on the ATMEGA 328. I ended up buying ~10 ATMEGA 328 chips and just change to a new one when the bootloader craps out. Haven't had any luck reburning the bootloader either.

I agree that going with a MEGA is the way to go. Unos have 6 analog inputs, and 2 of which get used by I2C (which I use for my LCD screen), which leaves you with 4 inputs. limiting your project to 4 sensors is a big limitation.

Thanks for the links!
 
definitely, Cheaper than Drugs and Women!..

And I see what you mean about the addictiveness, I'm only in the planning stage and my heads all over the place with Ideas, I keep seeing what others have done, and the effectiveness of the program. know I know that It can be done, I'm ready too have some fun! gonna place my order this week
 
Some advice if I may:

Get some sort of display screen. LCD screens are cheap. And some buttons for input. Its a lot easier to work with the arduino when you have a screen. Having to rely on the serial output is hard, since you have to have a computer hooked up to the arduino all the time, and the setup becomes much more impressive if you have a customized screen for the output that people can look at.

Start the project with an arduino MEGA. They have quite a few advantages which will help, and you can get them cheap online.

Do one thing at a time! Get one part of the code working 100%, and then try adding another feature. You'd be surprised how often one piece of code will effect another piece of code which you thought were unrelated.

Consider that the analog input is not as accurate as you may think. A 10 bit ADC will work for a lot of basic uses, but you can get more accurate(12 or 16 bit) analog input chips if you need something more accurate. Also there tends to be quite a bit of noise overall, especially when you're in the "prototyping" stages, since there are a lot of exposed wires and resistor legs, etc. Read up about using capacitors and resistors to drain excess voltage to ground to keep the pins from "floating".

Have fun!
 
Thank you Both for your sound advice, I do plan on taking it slow and doing controlled tests on the circuit as I go. I will certainly make sure that i bare in mind capacitors and resistors, That is definitely something I need to consider. I'm very excited about being able to build this :).. and will show mu progress once started, hopefully you guys will help me along the way ;).. and it may also help others with similar ambitions.

ATM.. I'm still in the planning but i think this might be my set up.. or Similar..
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121219399660?ssPageName=STRK:MESINDXX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1436.l2649

Touch Screen, Mainly for price when compared to an
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/290929571166?ssPageName=STRK:MESINDXX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1436.l2649

LCD 2x16 display.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/321274161759?ssPageName=STRK:MESINDXX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1436.l2649
Arduino Mega 328

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/290941791359?ssPageName=STRK:MESINDXX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1436.l2649

And This temperature sensor.

Just in case anyone else is looking
 
The controller that you listed isn't an Arduino Mega. It is a carbon copy of the Arduino Duemilinove (the chip is an ATmega328). The Duemilinove is now discontinued and is the original version of the Due. The Duemilinove is still a great board to learn with. The Due is the new heavy weight champ, however it differs from the others in that it operates on 3.3v, where the others and most shields run on 5v. Because of this voltage difference, this board is not recommended as a starting point into Arduino's.

The Mega is the next best (that I am aware of) and is the one that fits the specs of the new version of Reef Angel.

I don't have any experience with screens yet, but what I've learned is that you'll need to be able to tell the Arduino how to communicate with the screen. Most of the time, someone has already worked out the programing issues for each screen. Help is always available at the Arduino site.
 
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